Guile project submissions draft

[Klaus Schilling <Klaus.Schilling@home.ivm.de>]

Greg Harvey writes:
 > 
 > This is a hastily jotted format for the email submission
 > format. Ideas, advice, and opinions appreciated (let's try to keep it
 > at least pg-13, though ;')

What is pg-13? something to do with GNU Privacy Guard?
 > 
 > Each contents of each field must be enclosed in parenthesis... easy to
 > parse, easy to make sure that exactly what you think is being
 > submitted is being submitted. The only annoyance this brings is the
 > necessity to escape '()' in the text (do the \( \) thing).
 > 
 > A quick run down of commands.
 > 
 > %start : appears at the beginning of each mail; possibly superfluous,
 > but makes it easier to get right to the important stuff.
 > 
 > %name (name of project): Must be unique.

How would this be achieved? Maybe something like emacs does when encountering
several buffers with the same name, giving an automatic enumeration?
 > 
 > %password (password): this is an optional password for the entry (the
 > alternative is gnupg signed messages, though this is likely to be
 > implemented first). If given on the first email it sets the password
 > (rather than randomly generating one); in subsequent mails, it's used
 > to verify the modification.
 > 
 > The rest of the commands will totally modify the given field of the
 > record. 
 > 
 > %location (url): this should be a pointer to the homepage of the
 > project, or the distribution if no page is available.
 > 
 > %catagory (cat): this will be one of a set of pre-defined
 > catagories. Basically, things like Application/Game or Library
 > (module?) 
 > 
 > %description (desc): this should be a brief description (no more than
 > a paragraph) of the project. 
 > 
 > %author (name): the main author of the project (should this be authors?)
 > 
Would multiple appearances of this field be possible?

 > %contact (addr): an email contact for the maintainer (should this be
 > folded into author(s)?)
 >
What if authors and maintainers are different? May a mailing list be used
here? 
 
 > %status (status): the status of the project (maybe this should be
 > called news? I'd expect that you'd want to update this whenever
 > something interesting happens)

So this should be more precise than just expressions like `planned' `alpha' 
`beta' `pre-release' `stable' `abbandoned' ?
 > 
 > %help_wanted bool: indicates whether additional programmers are
 > wanted/needed. 
 > 
 > %testers_wanted bool: indicates whether the project wants people to
 > test (this may be a bit superfluous).

What when help or testers are wanted especially for certain purposes,
such as ports for some platforms, or request for a server machine to 
run the software on?

> 

How about some example? 
A HYPOTHETICAL one:
%start
%name (guilemacs)
%password (guessme)
%location (ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/guilemacs-1.0)
%category (application)
%description (patches for GNU Emacs 22.0 or above , enabling it to use
	     guile as the macro language. Contains a translator from
	     emacs lisp to guile, which can be invoked on the fly or
	     precompiling to a dynamically linkable guile module.
	     The latter feature requires Hobbit-4.0 or better.)
%author (Richard M. Stallman)
%contact (bug-emacs@gnu.org)
%status (The direct emacs lisp reader feature is now stable on all Posix
	3.0 Platforms and the GNU Hurd 2.0.* or better. The library module 
	generator is yet experimental, but turned sufficiently stable on 
	the GNU Hurd 2.1.17)
%help_wanted true
%testers_wanted true
--
Klaus Schilling