[OH-Publicity] We Fail [was: Upcoming posts]

[Asheesh Laroia]

Excerpts from Mark Holmquist's message of Fri Nov 16 00:29:06 -0500 2012:
> > I'd love to do it, and I'd love to do it this weekend. Just....remind
> > me. I'm not currently very organized.
> 
> I lied! I wrote a draft.
> 
> http://htmlpad.org/oh-why-we-fail/
> 
> http://htmlpad.org/oh-why-we-fail/edit
> 
> Edit, add, remove, change, whatever! I'd love feedback over email, too.
> 

Hello there!

Here are some thoughts!

I delivered some of these by IRC, but I thought it'd make sense to 
elaborate here.

In each section, I would indicate where we pass the tests, not just 
which ones we fail. For example, added this to the section about 
version control:

We have a web viewer on Github, and <a 
href="http://openhatch.readthedocs.org/en/latest/contributor/getting_started.html">documentation 
for newcomers</a>, and we definitely haven't written our own source 
control system.

Reading 
http://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/How_to_tell_if_a_FLOSS_project_is_doomed_to_FAIL 
again, there are some amusing semi-insane things that we don't do; you 
don't have list 'em all. But I think it'd be good to give people a sense 
of some of those, even if just to honor the semi-insanity of spot!

For example, for the "libraries" section we *do* use system libraries 
where present... except for the dependencies we bundle. I'll leave it to 
your discretion on if that's a violation. But check out the hilarity in 
mysite/manage.py and vendor/__init__.py -- that masks any 
system-installed versions of things in vendor/.

Similarly in "history," it'd be nice to indicate that we went all FLOSSy 
after a few months of not sharing the source. I guess I want to publicly 
shame us for not developing in the open from the get-go, but it might 
have been the right decision. Anyway, people might be bemused to learn 
that bit of history.

(Public release: https://openhatch.org/blog/2009/we-are-different/.

First commit: Thu Jun 4 2009, based on git log.)

(Admittely, we shared the source as soon as we went "out of beta" with 
that blog post.)

Also, arguably, I included changelogs in the git tag message for the 
releases we did do! Do check those out. The fact that they're hard to 
discover might mean I get subtle but earned points of fail, though.

Oh, and for Chromium's full points of fail as of 2009: 
http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale9x-media/scalemedia/scale/scale9x-media/simple_cfp/presentations/TomCallaway-SCALE-9x-Presentation.odp 
. It might be nice to link to the real number of points they earned.

We should probably be nice and say they fixed a few of these issues, per 
a blog post here: 
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/forking.html

...actually some of the comments about embedding sqlite are intriguing: 
http://spot.livejournal.com/312320.html?thread=1463808#t1463808

And wait a sec, I'm not sure that indicates any of these are fixed.

Anyway, Those are the things that I think would make this post totally 
great. Let me know what you think, Mark!

-- Asheesh.