One way would be to categorise areas and sub-areas and have a clear indication, where the work has not been done. So that if I came to such place, I could find the sub-topic that I am interested in with clear indication of the status.
On 5 Jul 2023, at 21:48, Brendan Barnwell <brenbarn@brenbarn.net> wrote:
On 2023-07-04 17:21, Christopher Barker wrote:
Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on these ideas (or others?) - both technical and social.
To my mind there are two interrelated social problems that make this task difficult:
1) Promulgating a list of "good" packages tends to make people think packages not on the list are not good (aka "implied exhaustiveness") 2) In order to curate all or nearly all packages, you need curators with a wide range of areas of interest and expertise (aka "breadth").
The reason these are interrelated is that once people start thinking your list is exhaustive, it's really important to have breadth in the curation, or else entire domains of utility can wind up having all packages implicitly proscribed.
As an example, a few months ago I wanted to do some automated email manipulations via IMAP. I looked at the builtin imaplib module and found it useless, so I went looking for other things. I eventually found one that more or less met my needs (imap_tools).
The question is, what happens when a person goes to our curated index looking for an IMAP library? If they don't find one, does that mean there aren't any, or there are but they're all junk, or just that there was no curator who had any reason to explore the space of packages available in this area? In short, it becomes difficult for a user to decide whether a tool's *absence" from the index indicates a negative opinion or no opinion.
There are ways around this, like adding categories (so if you see a category you know someone at least attempted to evaluate some packages in that category), but they can also have their own problems (like increasing the level of work required for curation). I'm not sure what the best solution is, but just wanted to mention this issue.
-- Brendan Barnwell "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail." --author unknown
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