4 Send all patches and "git request-pull"-formatted emails to our
5 self-hosting inbox at meta@public-inbox.org
6 It is archived at: https://public-inbox.org/meta/
7 and http://hjrcffqmbrq6wope.onion/meta/ (using Tor)
9 Contributions are email-driven, just like contributing to git
10 itself or the Linux kernel; however anonymous and pseudonymous
11 contributions will always be welcome.
13 Please consider our goals in mind:
15 Decentralization, Accessibility, Compatibility, Performance
17 These goals apply to everyone: users viewing over the web or NNTP,
18 sysadmins running public-inbox, and other hackers working public-inbox.
20 We will reject any feature which advocates or contributes to any
21 particular instance of a public-inbox becoming a single point of failure.
22 Things we've considered but rejected include:
24 * exposing article serial numbers outside of NNTP
25 * allowing readers to inject metadata (e.g. votes)
27 We care about being accessible to folks with vision problems and/or
28 lack the computing resources to view so-called "modern" websites.
29 This includes folks on slow connections and ancient browsers which
30 may be too difficult to upgrade due to resource demands.
32 Only depend on Free Software packages which exist in the "main"
33 section of Debian "stable" distribution. That is Debian 9.x
34 ("stretch") as of this writing, but "oldstable" (8.x, "jessie")
35 remains supported for v1 inboxes.
37 In general, we favor mature and well-tested old things rather than
40 Avoid relying on compiled modules too much. Even if it is Free,
41 compiled code makes packages more expensive to audit, build,
42 distribute and verify. public-inbox itself will only be implemented
43 in scripting languages (currently Perl 5) and optional
44 Just-Ahead-of-Time-compiled C (via Inline::C)
46 Do not recurse on user-supplied data. Neither Perl or C handle
47 deep recursion gracefully. See lib/PublicInbox/SearchThread.pm
48 and lib/PublicInbox/MsgIter.pm for examples of non-recursive
49 alternatives to previously-recursive algorithms.
51 Performance should be reasonably good for server administrators, too,
52 and we will sacrifice features to achieve predictable performance.
53 Encouraging folks to self-host will be easier with lower hardware
56 See design_www.txt and design_notes.txt in the Documentation/
57 directory for design decisions made during development.
59 See Documentation/technical/ in the source tree for more details
60 on specific topics, in particular data_structures.txt
62 Optional packages for testing and development
63 ---------------------------------------------
65 Optional packages testing and development:
67 - Plack::Test deb: libplack-test-perl
71 - Plack::Test::ExternalServer deb: libplack-test-externalserver-perl
72 pkg: p5-Plack-Test-ExternalServer
74 - Test::Simple deb: perl-modules-5.$MINOR
78 - XML::TreePP deb: libxml-treepp-perl
82 Email::MIME is optional as of public-inbox v1.5.0 but still
83 used for maintainer comparison tests:
85 * Email::MIME deb: libemail-mime-perl
92 The `make test' target provided by MakeMaker does not run in
93 parallel. Our `make check' target supports parallel runs, and
94 it also creates a `.prove' file to optimize `make check-run'.
96 The prove(1) command (distributed with Perl) may also be used
97 for finer-grained testing: prove -bvw t/foo.t
99 If using a make(1) (e.g. GNU make) with `include' support, the
100 `config.mak' Makefile snippet can be used to set environment
101 variables such as PERL_INLINE_DIRECTORY and TMPDIR.
103 With PERL_INLINE_DIRECTORY set to enable Inline::C support and
104 TMPDIR pointed to a tmpfs(5) mount, `make check-run' takes 6-10s
105 (load-dependent) on a busy workstation built in 2010.
110 * \w, \s, \d character classes all match Unicode characters;
111 so write out class ranges (e.g "[0-9]") if you only intend to
112 match ASCII. Do not use the "/a" (ASCII) modifier, that requires
113 Perl 5.14 and we're only depending on 5.10.1 at the moment.