[pmwiki-users] Pre-announcing 2.2.0 non-beta release

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Tue Jan 20 22:03:43 CST 2009


On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 01:15:36PM +1300, John Rankin wrote:
> >Therefore the first (before adding "automatic" installation) step
> >should be a quality control or rating of PmWiki extensions. This would
> >be more beneficial for the unexperienced user than automatic
> >installation.
> 
> I agree almost 100% (and my earlier post raised this very issue).
> Personally, I'm not a big fan of rating systems as a method of
> quality control, [...] So while it's harder,
> I would prefer a system based on a lightweight and transparent 
> quality control process. Ratings would be good for other reasons, 
> of course, but are not necessarily a mark of quality.

I find this to be a particularly insightful comment about
rating systems -- for any given extension, a rating system
(based on comments from others) is good for saying "How useful 
is X?" or "How easy is it to use X?"  But very few people are
going to have the time and/or ability to usefully evaluate
the "quality" of a recipe with respect to its security
or stability.

So, "[there] should be a quality control [...] of PmWiki
extensions"  is another one of those places that I fear 
handwaves away the difficult part of the whole problem.  :-)

Indeed, if it was easy, we'd probably already be doing it.  :-)

Pm



More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list