Subject: Re: [Tools-discuss] RFC search engine

From: =JeffH <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 08:38:10 -0700

> Our intention was that these tools could be delivered from the Tools site
 > but would not be considered actual Tools Team products.

when I was at Xerox back in the 80s, we had a similar notion for ad-hoc tools 
that were shared with the community. By convention, we called 'em "hacks" (not 
too surprisingly), and had a central distribution point for them. One could 
easily write a hack and share it with the internal (largely developers) 
community. There were some written informal rules (sorta "social norms wrt 
hacks"; there were kept on the hacks file server), similar to..

   "thou shalt provide a modicum of documentation when submitting a hack, shalt 
submit both source and binary; anyone can hack on any hack, tho by touching it, 
you may then own it; you use hacks at your own risk, but if you wrote a hack 
that's useful for getting real work done, and you're the current maintainer, 
then you're kinda obliged to engage if someone brings a bug to your attention, 
tho resolution and all is negotiable; its poor form to publish a poorly-tested 
hack, especially if its aimed at helping get real work done; etc ..."

I can imagine a similar set of norms working in this community.

=JeffH

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From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 09:31:52 -0700

>  "thou shalt provide a modicum of documentation when submitting a hack, . . .

Right. What we have is already documented internally in the Python and a bit more in the settings file. What we want to have before releasing beyond the tools team is an external text file that describes the tools and better commenting inside the Python so that other will feel encouraged to add more to the code.

--Paul Hoffman