Word

All right

hi

I figured make it private just to keep noise down, I have no prob adding people if they are going to contribute

I've prepared some points that where on my mind.

Going to delete the link as it is write access

Before talking about formats I'd rather would like to talk about some other points that I feel are more important like the goal, license and scope.. Not sure what you think :)

hm, crap, got to go now

you discuss without me, i'll join lateron

Agree 100%

does being a moderator automatically "approve" me to talk?

apparently yes

looks so

@NullUserException One might say "there is no way of shutting you up" But that would just be mean wouldn't it

So my main point that i think needs to be cleared is: Do you want to keep the option of putting that on dead trees

As that has some implications and kinda sets the direction for other decisions (i guess)

- Any plans on printing it on dead trees any time? <-- I would say yes, if it ever gets to that point

It's something I'd be interested in too, I'd feel like there is a change we 4 could collaborate on something actually worth reading

But then that's not really an "open" book anymore (i guess?) so i wanted to bring it up

Also it may kinda complicates things with contributions and such. So i feel thats a decission that could be clear from the get go

absolutely

hm...

What I could see happening is basically something like Code Complete 2, in that there's a cononical book which is edited and written by a group of people (select people). But there's also an online version of similar content that's open to contributions (wiki style)

What exactly would be the problem with print publishing it if it is collaboratively edited? That there is no real right owner?

@NikiC Correct. What happens with profits?

Ah, right.

Yeah that you can't give it to a publisher as there are to many right holders and they might sue and $complicated

Unless...

nah

And I guess that people don't like to contribute much if they need to transfer all their rights...

Right

Yeah, it sets the general tone for the project. To me it would be more interesting go get out a real book. It's not like we'd be making any real money off of this in any way but having the rights to let it print would be nice

Honestly, I'm game for either. I like the idea of us putting together a book (online or not), but would be cool with just doing it openly

More of a goal and a direction and i guess I just like the idea. But if you guys are not up for that I'd go for completely open too

(From that I've talked with gordon he shares that stance somewhat but he isn't going to have that much time in the next time)

So we agreed that I'll figure that out and tell him later :)

Well, let's run with the idea of an actual book for now (talk about it) and see where it takes us

Who would we have contribute? Gordon and the 3 of us. Who else?

Depends on what @NikiC thinks I'd say :)

Honestly: If you would be going for a book I'd say that enough people

@edorian I agree. But is there anyone else we want to contribute (or who would want to be a part that we think would be a good fit)?

There is someone who wanted

Levi something or such

I trust you guys enough to try it and see what happens. Not saying i don't like the others but for write access / license ownership stuff trust is important

hm...

As contributors there are 2-3 people from SO I'd like to recive contributions and also 2-3 people I'd rather not engage with at all

So open and print are exclusive options? (just to be sure I understand right)

For me it's open ether way. Github and always publish on the web

It's not about showing it, it's about taking content from other people. It would require us to figure out if we could do that and what license to use.

Yes, that's what I mean with open. That others can contribute

(I'm aware that I'm making this complicated by bringing up the book idea btw. But it was to tempting of a thought to pass)

@edorian It's good that you bring this up. Otherwise we would have gotten problems lateron

He there @LeviMorrison :)

Well, my opinion would be to assume the book case for now, clearly specify the intellectual property owners and let everybody else contribute if they transfer the rights.

If we can but it under CC it would ensure that the content isn't "lost" for anyone so I guess that would be fair

ohlo!

Hey there

hi @LeviMorrison

I'm still getting up to speed.

@edorian It was in the back of my mind as well

@edorian Well, we could get around that in one way

@edorian Putting it under CC is okay for printing?

Basically, we create an "organization" for the project. Then, we transfer all rights to the organization when we contribute (via a CLA). The organization can then publish under the rights of the CLA. The CLA would indicate two licenses. One for general publishing, and a CC-NC license. So we could publish on the web as CC-NC, but then have full rights to publish in an actual book

now, not all publishers will like that, but there are some that do it today

I like the organization idea.

It's fairly common these days.

sounds good

Who would own the organization?

Do you know o'reilly take on that? Because these are kinda the guys I'd ask first

Now, we'd have to be explicit about the different levels and ownership. So we'd have 2 levels of CLA: Owner and Contributor. People would start out as contributors which don't get money from publishing, but can contribute. The owners then split the money evenly between them. So if a contributor does a lot, we can promote them to owner level (and hence share profits)

and have majority decisions about everything (as in 3/4 people need to agree to get anything done) ?

@LeviMorrison It is?

@edorian Yup.

@edorian There's the document foundation for LibreOffice

Other's I can't think of atm.

@ircmaxell And that would actually work out with international law and all that good stuff?

@edorian Let's reach out. But the thing is as none of us are actually published now, I don't know how receptive they will be to backing a new project... Then again, if we just looked for feedback

@edorian Well, we'd need to register it in both areas (EU and USA). In general it's tricky though (considering I was a boardmember of an international company at one point)...

@LeviMorrison: where are you from/do you live?

@ircmaxell Utah, USA

So far we have 3 Germans and 2 Americans. So only 2 countries to deal with (so far)

Yeah... 'tricky' is the part I'm worried about. Given that there is a non-negligible chance we (well i can only speak for me i guess) don't get anything done it might be a lot of trouble before we actually get anything useful done :)

@edorian US government picked 2/3 vote. But considering this is a smaller and hopefully more trustworthy group than politicians, I'd go for 3/4.

Sounds good so far

Who's @Bill ?

@edorian Well, what I'd say is that we come to an agreement and document it. Then just get started and if we get somewhere worth talking about, we forge the legal bit at that point in time

@LeviMorrison Anyone can come in and view. But they need to request access to talk

@ircmaxell I haven't been online for some of this, so I didn't know if there was someone else :)

@ircmaxell I like that stance.

That would mean that we don't take contributions until we figured that out and have something worth caring about and then put a license on it after we figured out everything else?

@LeviMorrison Nope, the 5 of us are it

So, unless we get more people

I say we need 3/5 vote for decisions then.

@edorian Correct

@ircmaxell And until then we don't allow external contribution, right?

@NikiC That would be my guess.

which is what I think we should do as well. No open source project starts publically from commit 1 (unless they are an established project starting a new subproject). Every one goes through an internal private build phase until it's at a certain point

@NikiC Correct. We could even make it private if we really wanted to (I don't know, just an option)

@ircmaxell How well you know @LeviMorrison, not to be mean or anything but even trusting @NikiC is an 'adventure' for me (for the lack of a better word)

@edorian Nice use of adventure.

@edorian :(

It's just that I'm quite sure that you gordon and niki will be reasonable people but I haven't seen / heard much of levi

@edorian Not at all asside from what you know

I'm just being fucking honest atm. Sorry :)

aside from that he wants to do this (it was him who spurred this conversation)

@edorian me as well. There's no point not being honest at this point...

dinner, i'll read up the further conversation later

@NikiC :) I'll rephrase: I don't know you that long but I really like you so far. I just don't know you irl or very long so I'm not 100% sure

Well, my criminal activity record amounts to 1 speeding ticket. A road changed speed limits and I didn't know. If that's any help, @edorian. :)

But I'm sure that's not what you meant.

Like i said: Nothing personal. But I don't know your values in code, your personally or anything like that :) And if we'd go all public that wouldn't be that much of an issue but if we think about legal stuff I'm just bringing all my concerns to the table

I don't know anyone very well, honestly. But the fact that you are willing to do something about standards (even if unofficially) means a lot to me.

do you have a blog?

@LeviMorrison It's not about you selling yourself to me or anything. It's just that I don't want to trust "rather random" people on the net when they could potentially be a problem for something like that. I don't have ANY! reason to believe that about you but yeah.. just my concerns and I don't want to play games

So I'm rather talking about it

@ircmaxell No. I have two very outdated websites. I've been working for companies for a while and I haven't had time to keep anything up.

icidweb.com and wddb.com

Keep in mind wddb.com is old enough it's still advocating w3schools.

I may updated it just to remove that little detail . . .

any examples of writing and viewpoints as of recent?

My suggestion would be to let the idea settle a little and get back together tomorrow to see if that might work out or if we want to just try it open to avoid the issues?

Also check out oreilly.com/openbook

@ircmaxell Hm. . . not outside of chat, I don't think. And I think we can agree that chats are very different than books.

very

@edorian fair

abrupt question, but important one: How do you know you can write about technical subjects, and how do you know your ideas align with ours (would make a cohesive book)? And secondly, how can we know that?

To be clear, we are talking about creating a foundation which would author a document that may at some point be published in print.

Yes?

Somehow make it possible to create a book for everyone to see that still could get published

And avoid massive legal troubles in the process if possible

@ircmaxell You could have me write on some topic.

My current stance on that @LeviMorrison is that: I'd love for you to contribute if we make an open source project but if we try to get a book out I'd like us 4 (if gordon and nikic are on board too) to get that figured out and include you later.

@edorian Eh, fine. I'm a fairly agreeable person.

i'm back

But thats just me though. I don't want to discourage you or anything :/

To be honest, I disagree with people on a lot of things. However, I want to make it absolutely clear that just because I disagree on something does not mean I can't support it, and it doesn't mean I'm tied to that view. I'm very logical and practical.

So, maybe we want to discuss some other things now?

I know, the legal part is probably the most important in the end, but I'd like to discuss some of the other points in that document too

I'm not sure that at the moment we can be sure that ANY of our views on code are in alignment.

All right. Than lets do that

@LeviMorrison I don't think any two people do and thats a good thing

I'm happy if we write something with different viewpoints in it as there is no definitive answer in php anyways

So one thing I would like to discuss again is the format

@ircmaxell Still with us?

@NikiC I'd like to point out that using a strict format to pass ideas around and to make informal lists can be a really big pain. I'd suggest we just talk and make a list to begin with.

Should be go the publishing route docbook is kinda the way to go I'd say. For o'reilly for example i know that they use docbook internally and have their publishing build around that

that's what I was thinking too

github.com/edorian/docbook-sample-stuff

On the other hand I would like it much more to write in a plain text format (and I don't really like XML). But I would be okay with docbook too. I'd like @ircmaxell's opinion here

I've spent about 30 minutes stetting that up. So it's not pretty but it's something and not hard to maintain from what i can say

and it can do html-singlepage, html-multipage and with 10 minutes more work pdf

Writing it in any decent XML format will allow it to be rewritten in any other XML format.

That's what I really like about XML, personally.

Okay, I think I'd be okay with DocBook

@ircmaxell ?

@NikiC He might be gone . . .

Okay, so let's go to the next point on the list for now

@NikiC I'm not sure what that point is.

If it will be docbook publish formats are nothing to care about now, it will just be able to do whatever we want

great

So I think the last point of that list is the Hosting part, yes?

license we discussed so it's hosting and content that is left

okay

I pay for webhosting at 1and1.com and hardly use it.

Unless we need some specific stuff I can't get, I'd gladly host it.

hosting at github would be the easierst as there are not traffic issues and it just works (tm)

True.

apart from that I have 3 root servers

and stuff

@edorian but it should be hosted in a separate repo

I don't want to clutter the main one with pages commits of the built pages

the pages are on another branch

The other part about github is that it will be available the moment you start working on it. Unless you are already paying them.

edorian.github.com/php-coding-standard-generator

yes, they are on another branch, but won't that hurt still?

you mean size wise?

@LeviMorrison That shouldn't be a problem, should it? One can make it public but reserve all rights.

Maintainable isn't an issue. Size may be. That's right

I'm not quite sure myself what I mean by "hurt"

You just don't put built things in git repos ^^

@NikiC But if we aren't sure exactly what those rights are going to be, we can't really publish anything public, yes?

So if we want to put it in a repo, it should be separate ;)

Well

I'm a little distracted atm.

You might be right.

It's hard coding on JavaScript and only diverting a little of my attention to legal issues. Legal issues require my full CPU. ;)

What do you think @edorian about the github/publicRepo issue?

The build tools go into the repo for sure. Those are always needed with the "source". The outut is dicussable

@edorian Yes, build tools definitely go into the repo

@NikiC What issue? If we decide on private we'll figure it out, else it's not an issue

I have private repos ; just in case

Ah, okay, I wasn't sure whether somebody would be willing to pay for them

But starting open isn't going to be an issue

"Direct commit access for “core”?" => I think as the are starting privately this would make sense

Yeah, repo collab for core in both cases

Okay, so last point is content

Ah, the important stuff.

In my opinion.

What exactly is the domain of this project?

Are we talking about PHP only?

imho somewhat web and related tech too but mainly php

Agree with @edorian

of course interactions with database and http too

Yes

Agreed.

Mainly "higher level" PHP stuff and "common/best/sane pratices" for specific issues

Where's @ircmaxell ? Curses!

like db interaction, like the other things listed

Would 'common' patterns like MVC be part of it?

(Or whatever PHP people call MVC)

(I have a suspicion it's not really MVC)

<3

(to use that expression, i agree heavly)

mvc is rather a discussion subject than a practice

"This is what that word means.. well what it meant... well where it came from and how it was abused"

@edorian Change that to is abused and I agree 100%.

Going onto points why mvc isn't all you need in an architecture. But MVC is long and tedious

meetings

I'd also go for "craftman pratices" like TDD or stuff .. but I guess we should pick some points we tackle first and get some "chapters" done before doing everything

not "done done" but "readable"

So to recap, our domain is PHP and (closely) related technologies. It may include topics such as database usage, http requests, what MVC in PHP means, and things like Test-Driven-Development.

Yes?

Yeah, pretty much where it could go. Mostly its about what we are going to write and what people contribute/maintain i guess

okay quickly copied the points I though were most important into the document

And now I really got to go

nice

thanks

ok. We'll talk more tomorrow

What document is @NikiC referring to?

I linked it and delete the link before

thought you caught it

I missed it again.

sorry

I'm ready this time.

@edorian La tee da.

got it

Do we need to share email addresses?

I'm back

@LeviMorrison (puke)

@ircmaxell You don't like 1and1?

lol

hell no

I'd like to hear this experience . . .

It's bad

I'd love to hear it then.

Experience

@edorian I'm tempted to keep it not PHP specific. General development with a PHP flair...

@edorian Agreed.

@ircmaxell General web development?

%:s/web//

@ircmaxell General development is a much wider subject and a much less needed resource in my opinion.

Name a book on the subject besides Code Complete 2

I can't name a book, but there are lots of resources for general development online.

It's applying it to a domain that is usually the hardest part.

For example, you should use abstractions when you develop applications. What is a proper level of abstraction for PHP?

That's something I've never seen addressed.

Yet I see people dealing in native PHP types instead of using classes all the time, even when their code demands that the arrays have certain key values.

I do not see that problem exist in C++. Admittedly, I haven't reviewed nearly as much C++ code as I have PHP code.

@LeviMorrison Find them for me (please)

i'm back

@LeviMorrison I'd argue the for PHP is redundant in that realm

We really should get this clear

So we don't have false expectations

I personally would prefer something that is PHP centric after all

Also, who actually owns that public document we are editing?

I'd like to get an actual invite to the thing.

So I can find it easily.

I think that good development practices are pretty language agnostic, so it will in the end be not that much PHP

I have 4 computers I use throughout the week.

@LeviMorrison @edorian

And it should be listed in your docs automatically ;)

@NikiC That's my feel. If it has a PHP spin, fine. But I don't think it should be treated as a PHP book (personally)

then again, I wouldn't be overly opposed to putting it as a PHP book...

whatever

I'd go for a PHP book

I agree with @LeviMorrison that there is more need for that

@ircmaxell What is your current view on using DocBook?

@ircmaxell I don't necessarily think so on this point. I have a bunch of some type of object in an array. Should I make class ObjectList to manage it? Unless I'm doing more than adding/removing, it's not really worth it. In fact, it may hurt me.

@NikiC I think it's a bit much (overly agressive of a syntax), but whatever there too

@ircmaxell The pros would be that it's easy enough to set up (sais @edorian), that it can export into many formats and (again says @edorian) is handy for publishers

And as we don't want to be too open it seems that the verbose syntax isn't such a big problem

fair

Hmmm

hm?

@ircmaxell Even though I'm a fan of a PHP centric document, maybe moving to web-development would be more helpful

And we can happen to use PHP in examples.

let's talk in the next few days

let's

Hmm . . . I think one way to look at this document and to determine its scope is to look at common problems we see all the time here on SO.

In PHP, database usage is atrocious.

But if you move to a more general concept, you lose the benefit of talking about PDO and mysqli over mysql because you are no longer language centric.

So it's something we really need to agree on.

Also, I hope no one objected to my modification to the document to change the syntax lists into actually google document lists. My apologies if that wasn't wanted. Maybe markdown format was preferred, but some doc formatting was already being used.

will continue tomorrow