Everything2 github repository and being of value to perlmonks

[JayBonci]

Hey folks,

Some of you may or may not remember me, but I'm Jay Bonci, a longtime perlmonks semi-lurker, and the new owner of Everything2, the PM sister-site. Even though it diverged a long time ago, I'm hoping that things are still similar enough I'm back around actively developing and improving the core engine underneath E2 with a huge push to clean up a lot of old practices and bring the code forward to the modern era. I'd love to see if Perlmonks can get some use out of the tools that we're developing.

I've got a somewhat active repository going at github with our tools. Looking ahead to where I'd like to be:

• The development community should be developing inside of a bootstrapped sandbox machine running inside of a Vagrant virtual machine. This allows us to develop Chef recipes for box deployment as well
• Nodes are stored in git(hub) as XML with ecoretool.pl export, and are instantiated with ecoretool.pl import (or bootstrap). This allows for a sanitized environment and source control of the underlying nodes
• We're working towards compilation of the underlying htmlcodes, containers, htmlpages, opcodes, superdocs, etc that run the site and I've developed an execution environment using some symbol table muckery to make it think that it's running inside of Everything::HTML. This is going to reduce our apache footprint and our database load pretty significantly. It also allows for Devel::NYTProf to not get lost inside of evals

I'd be greatly interested in working with the PM staff to see what tools you can can lift or vice versa. Check out the github repository and message me here or over email on my homenode. The goal is to rapidly improve our body of in-database software and to get out of the performance bottlenecks that are increasing how much it costs to run the site (or conversely, how much capacity we get out of our current hardware).

[Corion]

Just to give you a quick heads-up - I very much welcome the move to git and the idea to move code out of the database and into git, or at least steps in that direction.

My current "problem" is that I'm quite busy with other (Perl) projects for the foreseeable future. That does not mean that your idea is unwelcome!

[JayBonci]

Is the perlmonks code currently anywhere in source control that's publicly accessible?

[jdporter]

No; and to make matters worse, there are some nodes which are accessible only by the gods; pmdev (that includes you) do not have access. However, I think the subset of these which are critical ("infrastructure" nodes) is quite small.

[jdporter]

Thanks, JayBonci! That all sounds great. I am very positively disposed toward such ideas, at least in the abstract. But I do have concerns that our architectures may have diverged substantially enough that "porting" all that nouveau coolness to here would be very far from trivial. I'd love to be shown that my worries are unfounded!

[JayBonci]

I'm not so sure that we're way far off. Currently, the big piece of our tech looks like:
• Getting nodes into and out of git as slimmed down XML
• being able to "bootstrap" an ecore site (such as perlmonks or E2) based out of github, so that multiple developers can work on the engine instead of patching the nodes in the database
If the underlying libraries are in source control anywhere, then we can see if there's anything that needs to be done to bring them together. I'd be happy to set up my github project so that perlmonks can submodule the tools section.

I don't know how much unification work it's going to take to port it, but if it's doable, it's certainly worth the gains in performance. Our compiled mode alone does wonders for performance on the dev branch.