This is not the beginning of the end...

.... but rather the end of the beginning.

Hi folks!

As some of you may know, I have a new job since june. And less free time, 
particularly for playing golf. As some of you may know too, Dave also have a 
new position in his job, and this means... Yes, you got it: less free time, 
too.

Back in february, when the Perl Review was first published, we decided to run 
the golf tournaments. Since then, perl golf has became more and more popular, 
and we came with pgas in order to ease the referee task, and to up the 
golfers pleasure: as you _all_ know, it's really a pleasure to see that 
you're in the sandtrap, or two strokes behind <insert-a-name-here> with no 
hope to shave one or more characters (so close, but so far ;) )...

OTOH, refereeing is a hard task. And time-consuming. Especially when you're 
only two referees - as we were with Dave in the beginning of TPR's contests. 
And finding a new hole every month may be a pain in the ass. That's why we 
opened the monthly challenge to famous perl golfers who wanted to propose a 
hole (remember the so-called "Dutch Open"?). This was fresh air for Dave and 
I. And thanks to all of you who volunteered to referee, there was a monthly 
contest.

As I just told you, Dave and I have less and less free time. You could ask 
why we should bother, since there are now teams of referees? Well, the answer 
fits in 4 letters: P G A S.

PGAS (Perl Golf Administration System - did you know it?) still needs a 
little care - in order to create the hole in the database, set up the rules, 
update the test script, modify the status of an entry... That's neither very 
difficult, nor very time-consuming, but it has to be done.

Hopefully, PGAS is now mature enough in order to be easily understood by even 
new-comers. That's why, Dave and I decided to open PGAS referee-ing. It would 
be ideal to have one of the referees to be a "pgas-man" for each tournament.

As Eric Raymond said in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar":
	When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to 
	it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Here, it's slightly different: it's not loose of interest in perl golf, but 
lack of time. Hopefully, if we can fill in the gap between "Dave & I" 
pgas-men and a "pool of pgas-men", I'll be (and I'm sure Dave will be too) 
still there either as a referee, or as a regular golfer - but if I really 
can't play or help, then I would know that there would still be a monthly 
tournament.

Ok, no more blah blah, here's the deal: we need to have pgas-men, in order to 
take care of pgas for future contests. Volunteers are welcome. But, since you 
can do whatever you want to the golf database, and can easily cheat *even if 
you're a regular golfer*, we will accept only well-known golfers (what about 
voting on the mailing-list?): time to really activate in order to be famous, 
isn't it? ;)

In order to be a pgas-man, you'll have to register at sourceforge, and send 
us your sourceforge login so we can add you to the project. We'll make a 
course for those of you who want to help. And if you want to volunteer later 
- no problem, just tell us when you'll be ready!

Once again, we did not lose interest in Perl Golf. And if someone thinks so, 
he'll be very surprised when I'll kick his butt in a not-so-distant 
tournament (personal note: beware, Rick, I'll be back!).

We're waiting for you.

JérÃÂ?me
-- 
jquelin@wanadoo.fr

• This is not the beginning of the end... by Jerome Quelin
• Re: This is not the beginning of the end... by Juho Snellman
• RE: This is not the beginning of the end... by Dave Hoover