From: Paul W. Schleck (pschleck@novia.net)
Date: Sun Jul 07 2002 - 08:19:08 CDT
Those of you who have been using auto-faq for several years and
following its development may have noticed that it took a little over
three years for auto-faq to go from 3.3 to 3.3.1. This wasn't due to
the development being very complicated or time-consuming. Rather, that
I had a lot of personal and professional obligations over that time. I
wanted to make sure that all pending changes had been made to auto-faq
before I finalized 3.3.1 (and finalized the 3.x major revision branch).
This task was staring me in the face for quite a while before I found
the time and energy to tackle it. Fortunately, previous versions
(including beta versions) were stable enough that FAQ maintainers used
them without significant errors or complaints in the meantime.
In the past year, I was contacted by an individual with experience in
open source who had some ideas for a 4.x version. After some
discussion, we decided the following enhancements to auto-faq were
worthwhile:
- Perl 5-only version, taking advantage of Perl 5-only features
- In addition to Perl-5 compliant syntax, convert to Perl-5 programming
style, including variable naming and capitalization conventions
- Built in HTML support and text conversion (via a hook to "lynx -dump,"
or possibly a Perl module)
- Abandon use of Configure script (generated by metaconfig) in favor of
a better configuration/installation scheme (how about a version of
auto-faq in Linux RPM format, for example?)
- Dump inews in favor of Net::NNTP module (or possibly even News::Article)
- Dump sendmail in favor of Net::SMTP module
(The last two would enable auto-faq to run on other operating systems
besides Unix.)
At the suggestion of the original auto-faq maintainer, Ian Kluft, we set
up a SourceForge site for auto-faq:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/auto-faq/
Don't look for any new versions of auto-faq there, because the
individual was not able to make any progress in a year, nor did he think
he would be able to even look at auto-faq in the next 6 months. At that
point, I had to let him go and seek other options. A minimum 6 month
delay meant that it would be worthwhile to seek other developers.
I'm not saying that I'm completely burned out, but my custodianship of
auto-faq has been longer than Ian's (I took over in 1995, after Ian
developed it from scratch around 1992 and enhanced it over the next 3
years). Perhaps it's now time, especially with the 3.x major revision
branch going final, that I seek other volunteer developers to work on
the proposed 4.x enhancements, and do it via the SourceForge
collaborative environment.
I welcome additional discussion on the subject, either here, or on the
auto-faq Users Mailing List ( , "subscribe
auto-faq-users"). If there are additional good ideas for enhancements,
I'd like to hear them. I'd also to recruit new developers who are
willing to work in the SourceForge environment and develop the next
major revision of auto-faq.
--
Paul W. Schleck
auto-faq Maintainer
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Mon Aug 12 2002 - 14:56:44 CDT