From: Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>
To: meta@public-inbox.org
Subject: [PATCH] HACKING: more docs about our philosophy
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:24:05 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20160106002406.15447-1-e@80x24.org> (raw)
Reiterating reasons behind what we do might help drive our point
across better.
---
HACKING | 27 +++++++++++++++++++++++++--
1 file changed, 25 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
diff --git a/HACKING b/HACKING
index 1cda588..a766820 100644
--- a/HACKING
+++ b/HACKING
@@ -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.
--
EW
next reply other threads:[~2016-01-06 0:24 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2016-01-06 0:24 Eric Wong [this message]
2016-01-06 0:24 ` [PATCH] TODO: add a few more items Eric Wong
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