Re: Roadmap/plan for Perl 5?

* sawyer x <xsaw...@gmail.com> [2014-09-03 00:45]:
> I think much of the bike-shedding is done because there is no clear> direction.

I think you have this backwards. It seems to me the reason there is no
roadmap is that there are way more people with opinions than people who
make things happen. (Yours truly included.) The peanut gallery on here
positively dwarfs the group of actual developers.

The paucity of doers is partly due to the fact that various areas of the
code are less than accessible to novices. The people who actually go to
the effort of doing stuff mostly do so because they are compelled by
individual agenda (dito Leon). The darker corners especially demand the
persistence that is hard to come by in any other way than by force of
personal agenda (hence demerphq’s and KHW’s areas of expertise, e.g.).

So p5p is much less of a cohesive group than a loose collective, just
with various individuals in charge of various points of convergence,
e.g. the pumpking, to corral the output and maintain standards.

To echo Nick’s themes a bit here, it does not seem to be for lack of
a list of places to go that we don’t have more people showing up who are
looking to contribute. And topics like “where do we see Perl in 5/10
years from now” appear an especially open invitation to bikeshed with no
particular intent to implement. The modesty of a TODO list is an asset
in averting such diversions.

It could be good to more consciously curate the one we have, though.
Say for example, interviewing people who commit code to ask what their
personal unpublished TODO lists contain, and compiling and editing the
result; see if there are things in there that could be delegated.

Well volunteered? :-)

-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>