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author | Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> | 2016-01-06 00:01:42 +0000 |
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committer | Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> | 2016-01-06 00:23:13 +0000 |
commit | b0a5137ef1ae1e7b55dab17d58e5ddb0da8907b1 (patch) | |
tree | c68bc65563c89b0f75fe90090e1645d6c978b23a | |
parent | 51c8178c0dda34d89f73eae2de2b73abedb6b877 (diff) | |
download | public-inbox-b0a5137ef1ae1e7b55dab17d58e5ddb0da8907b1.tar.gz |
Reiterating reasons behind what we do might help drive our point across better.
-rw-r--r-- | HACKING | 27 |
1 files changed, 25 insertions, 2 deletions
@@ -11,8 +11,31 @@ Please consider our goals in mind: These goals apply to everyone: users viewing over the web or NNTP, sysadmins running public-inbox, and other hackers working public-inbox. -We will reject any feature which advocates or contributes to a particular -instance of a public-inbox becoming a single point of failure. +We will reject any feature which advocates or contributes to any +particular instance of a public-inbox becoming a single point of failure. +Things we've considered but rejected include: + +* exposing article serial numbers outside of NNTP +* allowing readers to inject metadata (e.g. votes) + +We care about being accessible to folks with vision problems and/or +lack the computing resources to view so-called "modern" websites. +This includes folks on slow connections and ancient browsers which +may be too difficult to upgrade due to resource demands. + +Only depend on Free Software packages which exist in the "main" +section of Debian 7.0 and later. (We will bump version requirements +as time passes, but this is current as of January 2016). +In general, we favor mature and well-tested old things rather than +the shiny new. + +Avoid relying on compiled modules too much. Even if it is Free, +compiled code makes packages more expensive to audit, build, and +distribute and verify. public-inbox itself will only be implemented +in scripting languages (currently Perl 5). + +Performance should be reasonably good for server administrators, too, +and we will sacrifice features to achieve predictable performance. See design_www.txt and design_notes.txt in the Documentation/ directory for design decisions made during development. |