4 ms·

Let me tell you the story of how I got involved in the Perl 6 community. I was trying to find out how Perl 6 was progressing, and found a broken link on a rela

Let me tell you the story of how I got involved in the Perl 6 community. I was trying to find out how Perl 6 was progressing, and found a broken link on a related website (pugscode.org, now defunct). So I went into the #perl6 IRC channel to report it. Within three minutes, Audrey Tang (to become minister without portfolio in Taiwan in October) had committed a fix, somehow found an email address of mine, and sent me a commit bit to the central SVN repo that contained the Pugs project (the Perl 6 implementation in Haskell she was working on), the source to various websites, the Perl 6 test suite, and a lot of other stuff around the ecosystem. Just because I reported a broken link. It was the most inclusive community I've ever experienced. They had written a custom web app to manage email-based invites to an SVN repo, where everybody with commit access could invite somebody else. Today, we try to carry on her inclusiveness, and give just about everybody who wants write access to all repos of the perl6 organization on github. We have a github team with more than 220 members and about 40 repos, including the Perl 6 design documents, the official test suite, the perl6.org website and the official docs. I haven't heard of a single instance of vandalism or other misuse of the trust. Want to contribute to Perl 6? Just tell me your github username!

eliaspro 10y ago
Small OpenSource world. I remember you suddenly starting huge PRs with massive improvements to the OTRS code base. Although I don't use and contribute to OTRS that much anymore due to the increasing "Open Core" business model around it, your contributions taught me a lot and significantly improved my Perl and OTRS experience.
emmelaich 10y ago
Same! I got a commit bit after a few minutes of chatting on #perl6 from Audrey. I made some reasonable comments, was not obviously an idiot. I was very excited about Perl6 after going to a presentation from Audrey. Sadly I have never exercised it as I moved from Perl to Python and other since then. Perl6 may have ruled the world by now if it had gotten popular enough in the early 2000s. Too late now methinks.
- cygx 10y ago
  Too late now methinks. Who knows. Remember, it took more than 10 years for Python to get popular...
rwmj 10y ago
I think the most interesting part of your story is that Taiwan now has a minister "placed in charge of helping government agencies communicate policy goals and managing information published by the government, both via digital means" who actually knows about computers! Something that seems as if it would never happen here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang#Political_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang#Political_career
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Yeah, I'd be very surprised if anyone in congress could even spell IRC, let alone be an active contributing member of a programming community. It's a shame that the people who are making the biggest decisions about the legality and future of all this stuff largely have no idea what they're dealing with or have any clue how any of it works.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    But that's true for literally every industry. Congress passes laws about healthcare even though very few of them are doctors. They pass laws about oil drilling and I doubt many of them have training in that. Etc, etc. Congress is incompetent at everything. Its just that you only notice when they are talking about something you know about.
    - michel-slm 10y ago
      When Bill Frist was Senate majority leader, despite his training as a medical doctor he didn't exactly use that competence in the Terri Schiavo case. Congress is inevitably political, the problem is how to provide unbiased expert advice to it.
h1d 10y ago
I don't want to sound too negative but doesn't this look like they were in need of volunteers even by risking the repo's integrity by allowing total strangers commit access from lack of commitment from the real core team? It almost sounds like perl6 is a publically writeable repo.
- avar 10y ago
  What do you think the risk is? That some sociopath gains access to the perl6 repo and replaces all the code with a shellscript that "sudo rm -rf /"'s? Sure, that's possible, but good contributors will vastly outnumber bad contributors, and such a person's commit access would be revoked instantly. There's still code review for everything, and such a change would not go unnoticed. Just look at Wikipedia. That's the equivalent of a publically writeable repo and hasn't turned into a total shitshow as a result. As the Perl 6 ecosystem demonstrates you get way more out of inclusiveness than being paranoid about some hypothetical bad actor getting access to your repo.
  - ycensorator 10y ago
    I don't think there is nearly as much code review in open source projects as people would like to think. Then there is the problem of churn if the new committers get confident and rewrite minor things, which is quite taxing on the existing committers. Wikipedia is a good example that a small number of people either have to guard their territory ferociously or else have everything rewritten. Now, sometimes a rewrite is in order, but in general churn is a major time sink for longer term committers and in fact one of the reasons they ultimately leave.
  - pwdisswordfish 10y ago
    > That some sociopath gains access to the perl6 repo and replaces all the code with a shellscript that "sudo rm -rf /"'s? No, that some sociopath gains access to the perl6 repo and introduces subtle, plausibly deniable backdoors. I have looked at Wikipedia. I saw that obvious vandalism, like inserting "HAHA PENIS" in the middle of an article about — I don't know — US presidential candidates, is detected quickly; sometimes it is even caught by filters before it can be saved. Fabricating citations about a fictitious Bhutanese author[1] or Aboriginal deity[2], on the other hand, can go unnoticed for months. This is exacerbated by the fact that your typical "counter-vandalism patrol" usually looks only for the former; even though most hoaxes aren't even especially sophisticated and fall apart after 15 minutes of research. But who can blame those people? It's the easiest way to score virtue points. I don't know why some people are so okay with the most popular reference work of today being developed by a process basically equivalent to Twitch Plays Pokémon. It doesn't even work for the latter... and yet here we are. [1] http://wikipediocracy.com/2015/04/05/bhutanese-passport-what-does-the-hoax-say/ http://wikipediocracy.com/2015/04/05/bhutanese-passport-what... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar%27Edo_Wens_hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar%27Edo_Wens_hoax (embrace the irony!)
dorianm 10y ago
Sure, sounds fun, my username is Dorian :)
- perlgeek 10y ago
  Invitation sent. Have the appropriate amount of fun! :-)
jancborchardt 10y ago
Similar here: At Nextcloud we are also radically inclusive and have never seen a case of vandalism. Granted, there were few occurences of accidental pushes to master here and there. But that’s where git itself helps and also the recent addition of protected branches on Github is very useful. :) If the community is open and these artificial barriers to entry are removed, then people are way more likely to get involved.

eliaspro 10y ago

Small OpenSource world. I remember you suddenly starting huge PRs with massive improvements to the OTRS code base. Although I don't use and contribute to OTRS that much anymore due to the increasing "Open Core" business model around it, your contributions taught me a lot and significantly improved my Perl and OTRS experience.

emmelaich 10y ago

Same! I got a commit bit after a few minutes of chatting on #perl6 from Audrey. I made some reasonable comments, was not obviously an idiot. I was very excited about Perl6 after going to a presentation from Audrey. Sadly I have never exercised it as I moved from Perl to Python and other since then. Perl6 may have ruled the world by now if it had gotten popular enough in the early 2000s. Too late now methinks.

cygx 10y ago
Too late now methinks. Who knows. Remember, it took more than 10 years for Python to get popular...

rwmj 10y ago

I think the most interesting part of your story is that Taiwan now has a minister "placed in charge of helping government agencies communicate policy goals and managing information published by the government, both via digital means" who actually knows about computers! Something that seems as if it would never happen here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang#Political_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang#Political_career

seanp2k2 10y ago
Yeah, I'd be very surprised if anyone in congress could even spell IRC, let alone be an active contributing member of a programming community. It's a shame that the people who are making the biggest decisions about the legality and future of all this stuff largely have no idea what they're dealing with or have any clue how any of it works.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  But that's true for literally every industry. Congress passes laws about healthcare even though very few of them are doctors. They pass laws about oil drilling and I doubt many of them have training in that. Etc, etc. Congress is incompetent at everything. Its just that you only notice when they are talking about something you know about.
  - michel-slm 10y ago
    When Bill Frist was Senate majority leader, despite his training as a medical doctor he didn't exactly use that competence in the Terri Schiavo case. Congress is inevitably political, the problem is how to provide unbiased expert advice to it.

h1d 10y ago

I don't want to sound too negative but doesn't this look like they were in need of volunteers even by risking the repo's integrity by allowing total strangers commit access from lack of commitment from the real core team? It almost sounds like perl6 is a publically writeable repo.

avar 10y ago
What do you think the risk is? That some sociopath gains access to the perl6 repo and replaces all the code with a shellscript that "sudo rm -rf /"'s? Sure, that's possible, but good contributors will vastly outnumber bad contributors, and such a person's commit access would be revoked instantly. There's still code review for everything, and such a change would not go unnoticed. Just look at Wikipedia. That's the equivalent of a publically writeable repo and hasn't turned into a total shitshow as a result. As the Perl 6 ecosystem demonstrates you get way more out of inclusiveness than being paranoid about some hypothetical bad actor getting access to your repo.
- ycensorator 10y ago
  I don't think there is nearly as much code review in open source projects as people would like to think. Then there is the problem of churn if the new committers get confident and rewrite minor things, which is quite taxing on the existing committers. Wikipedia is a good example that a small number of people either have to guard their territory ferociously or else have everything rewritten. Now, sometimes a rewrite is in order, but in general churn is a major time sink for longer term committers and in fact one of the reasons they ultimately leave.
- pwdisswordfish 10y ago
  > That some sociopath gains access to the perl6 repo and replaces all the code with a shellscript that "sudo rm -rf /"'s? No, that some sociopath gains access to the perl6 repo and introduces subtle, plausibly deniable backdoors. I have looked at Wikipedia. I saw that obvious vandalism, like inserting "HAHA PENIS" in the middle of an article about — I don't know — US presidential candidates, is detected quickly; sometimes it is even caught by filters before it can be saved. Fabricating citations about a fictitious Bhutanese author[1] or Aboriginal deity[2], on the other hand, can go unnoticed for months. This is exacerbated by the fact that your typical "counter-vandalism patrol" usually looks only for the former; even though most hoaxes aren't even especially sophisticated and fall apart after 15 minutes of research. But who can blame those people? It's the easiest way to score virtue points. I don't know why some people are so okay with the most popular reference work of today being developed by a process basically equivalent to Twitch Plays Pokémon. It doesn't even work for the latter... and yet here we are. [1] http://wikipediocracy.com/2015/04/05/bhutanese-passport-what-does-the-hoax-say/ http://wikipediocracy.com/2015/04/05/bhutanese-passport-what... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar%27Edo_Wens_hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar%27Edo_Wens_hoax (embrace the irony!)

dorianm 10y ago

Sure, sounds fun, my username is Dorian :)

perlgeek 10y ago
Invitation sent. Have the appropriate amount of fun! :-)

jancborchardt 10y ago

Similar here: At Nextcloud we are also radically inclusive and have never seen a case of vandalism. Granted, there were few occurences of accidental pushes to master here and there. But that’s where git itself helps and also the recent addition of protected branches on Github is very useful. :) If the community is open and these artificial barriers to entry are removed, then people are way more likely to get involved.