LWN site code

LWN site code

Posted Jul 10, 2009 20:47 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN) by jspaleta
Parent article: USPS goes open-source with tracking system (GCN)

Could you take the time and use spot's scoring system and tell us where the LWN opening effort would fall on the failure scale?

It would be up there, but probably unfairly so. We don't have things like "releases" or build documentation because there's only one deployed site. For similar reasons we have no mailing list, no web site, etc.

It's actually not all that bad of a code base, considering; I'm not ashamed of it. But, naturally enough, neither is it particularly polished or ready for more general use.

The question is, why aren't you using an AGPL open solution that will in the long term lower your own maintenance burden by allowing you to share that burden with a community of users/developers who share pieces of a larger solution?

If we were starting now we'd probably do that; there's a lot of good stuff out there. When I did start, back in 2002, I based the first version on what seemed to be the best option available at that time: Zope/CMF. But then I got distracted for three months, came back, and realized that I had absolutely no clue of what my code was doing. That was a shock - Python isn't normally like that. So I decided I was better off doing something new, and I've not regretted that.

Now there's so many good options that it would make little sense to start from the beginning. We've talked occasionally about switching to something more mainstream, but that would be a world of pain too.

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