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Re: UserIDs and setups for developers



On 11/25/12, Gordon Haverland <ghaverla@materialisations.com> wrote:
> On November 24, 2012, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
>> Just use your own email address, ghaverla@...
>>
>> If you want to distinguish various email addresses, create
>> multiple (real) email addresses, and use those per-project.
>> That could easily get unwieldy though...
>>
>> Where do you want emails to go? Is your code to be given away/
>> made public in some way?
>> Presumably by including an email address in your source code,
>> you're providing a way for other developers to contact you. In
>> which case, to satisfy your intent you need to use a real
>> email address.
>
> I am getting close to producing a package (written in Perl) which
> is useful to people who do GPS related work, but should be useful
> to any kind of surface related work (such as Materials Science and
> Engineering, which is my "home").  But, I think this package will
> eventually be something like 50 different modules, as probably
> something like 10 different families of packages.
>
> The intention is to send this to CPAN, being a Debian person I
> suppose I could build it for Debian.  But parts of this package
> are of general usefulness.  Which is why it will be families of
> modules.

If you build for debian, dpkg-deb can un-zip a .deb package, just like tar etc.
If it's generally useful to a range of people, then presumably it will
get used, regardless of packaging - but easy installation does make it
more convenient.

> Most people start by doing something simple.  I didn't.  From what
> other people have recommended, I should start "publishing" the
> bits that work.

Definitely. Publish early, publish often.

Create a git account somewhere, eg on code.google.com

Choose a license before publishing I recommend. I like GPL family,
others prefer BSD/X/MIT family etc.

See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
for comparison and ideas on why _you_ might prefer one license over
another. You might choose to choose a license on pragmatic,
political-strategic, broad-acceptance-strategic, or other bases.

> I suppose most people who write Perl code, expect bugs and
> everything else to go to CPAN.  Over the years, I've had questions
> about using various other Perl modules, and so having some other
> contact method seems to be needed.  I thought it would be useful
> on my end, to have incoming mail related to Perl, to have a UserID
> of 'perl' in the destination address.

I think just a regular email address - either way, make sure to test
whatever email addy you choose, that it gets to you, when an email is
sent from in-the-wild.

> Maybe this package of mine becomes useful to people.  And perhaps
> Debian picks it up.  My hope then would be to use debian@... as
> the contact, instead of perl@....

That is natural part of debian packages - std contact locations, bug
reporting etc.

> I can see how this can snowball into all kinds of directions.  I
> have never produced software which  is useful across many
> different applications before, and I am just trying to minimize
> problems for me, or for users.

Focus on releasing those parts which work. Small clean modular,
working, these are good attributes :)

cheers
zenaan


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