From b0a5137ef1ae1e7b55dab17d58e5ddb0da8907b1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Eric Wong Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2016 00:01:42 +0000 Subject: HACKING: more docs about our philosophy Reiterating reasons behind what we do might help drive our point across better. --- HACKING | 27 +++++++++++++++++++++++++-- 1 file changed, 25 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) (limited to 'HACKING') diff --git a/HACKING b/HACKING index 1cda588e..a7668209 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. -- cgit v1.2.3-24-ge0c7