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Postings from November 2003
Shlomi Fish wrote: > My friend ... Shlomi, is it possible that your friend is you? Just kidding ;) But seriously, you don't want to make enemies with the very people who decide whether to commit your contributions or not. With every post on the line you have taken now, your p5p karma is exponentially decrementing. Probably it has already passed 0 and heading into a deep minus. Once you are in minus, it will take a hell of an effort to get yourself above zero. People will simply ignore your posts, without even trying to see whether they are of any use. Before you come out with any big suggestions you need to gain that karma by working hard and contributing a lot. You don't have to be a core C programmer or understand perl guts to be a great asset to the perl community. As someone who wrote a lot of docs in the last 5 years, if you will allow me to give you an advice, it's really easy to improve docs incrementally by just watching discussions on this list, beginners list, perlmonks.org and any other lists that you are hanging on, and post patches based on the threads that won't have been started if the docs were there, and fixing the gaps by making summaries of those threads and posting them here as patches to .pod files. Notice that you don't even have to participate in those threads, all you need is to be a good librarian. The majority of the mod_perl 1.0 guide (http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/) which is more than 1000pp worth of docs, was written just like that. People asked questions on the list, gurus have answered them, someone has summarized those threads and added them to the docs, so the broken records effect won't repeat again. It worked and still works perfectly for us, and you can do the same. Take it in baby steps and you will get far... As for gaining back your karma, stop this thread right now, don't post any follow ups which just turn into more flame baits. Not even to this email. Take a deep breath. Go over the p5p archives from the last week and see whether there was something discussed that is not (well?) documented well in .pods and post a patch fixing the situation. Once you are done, go to the week before, and repeat the process again. The cool thing is that you don't have to think about what should be fixed, others tell you that all the time. Many times I don't have the time to write summaries, so I mark candidate threads as something that I'd like to be documented. and hopefully come back to them later. In fact I've a whole lot of docs to write, based on the recent input from TomC and NI-S about the intricacies of the IO stuff. I hope I'll catch up with those soonish. Finally, it's being a good example that you are after, not volunteers. You want to be an example to other potential contributors. When people see that someone does a great job contributing, they want to do the same (who am I kidding ;). __________________________________________________________________ Stas Bekman JAm_pH ------> Just Another mod_perl Hacker http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide ---> http://perl.apache.org mailto:stas@stason.org http://use.perl.org http://apacheweek.com http://modperlbook.org http://apache.org http://ticketmaster.com