urchin/TODO
2016-02-08 15:48:57 +00:00

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Things I want
=============
Molly guard
-------------
The Molly-guard should be more accepting so that people don't have to use it
all the time and thus get used to using it. For example, you shouldn't need to
pass -f in this case.
https://github.com/creationix/nvm/issues/357
Test speed
-------------
Make tests run faster.
https://github.com/bike-barn/hermit/issues/62
First, easier thing is probably to run tests in parallel.
Second, also easier thing is to tell people to save things to RAM rather than
disk whenever they can.
Third, harder thing is to put the test suite in RAM automatically. Maybe the
whole test directory, which includes fixtures, gets copied to a tmpfs if one
exists.
Hmm or maybe there's a compromise: Tell people to mount /tmp as a tmpfs so
that temp files are fast. Maybe allow people to set some other directory as
the temporary file place, in case they want a different tmpfs location.
Options
-------------
I want long options. For example, there's presently -f and -e.
I want to make them -f|--force and -e|--exit.
Environment variables
-------------
Do something to make it easier to debug environment variables, because that is
often confusing.
https://github.com/creationix/nvm/issues/719
https://github.com/creationix/nvm/issues/589
Documenting that people should run "env" when their tests fail might be good
enough.
Licensing and copyright
------------------------
* Reference all owners and years in the Copyright file
* Consider copyleft licenses
* Add license notices to other files if necessary
Packaging
------------
Package for package managers.
* I want NixOS, of course.
* Debian is probably the big one.
Other interesting package managers
* Update the npm package
* Homebrew (for Mac)
Windows
----------
Try running Urchin in Windows somehow. I guess CygWin.
Consider copyleft licenses
----------
ScraperWiki owns the original version of Urchin (Thomas Levine did the early
work as part of his work for ScraperWiki.) and originally licensed it under an
MIT-style license. Other people made changes after this original ScraperWiki
version. As of January 2016, they are just Thomas Levine (when he wasn't
working for ScraperWiki) and Michael Klement.
The original license was MIT just because that's what ScraperWiki put on
everything. Should we change the license?
The MIT-style license grants pretty much all rights. It says that you need
to attribute when you redistribute source code, but you don't
necessarily have to redistribute source code.
A copyleft license adds the restriction that modified versions of the
code need to be licensed under the same license. GNU licenses in
particular require that source code be released if non-source versions are
released, and the different GNU licenses differ in what how the
non-source version is defined. (The original, GPL, discusses compiled
binaries.) Copyleft doesn't mean anything specific for commercial use.
MIT-licensed code can be modified and then licensed as GPL, because MIT
license allows that, but GPL code can't be modified as MIT, because MIT
doesn't allow that. And if we get all of the authors to agree on it, we
can always add whatever crazy license we want, regardless of what we
have already.
The distinction between MIT-style and GNU-something might matter quite little
in the case of Urchin.
1. Urchin is written in an interpreted language (shell), so it might be
hard to distribute usefully without providing the source code.
2. Urchin just runs tests; it doesn't get compiled with the rest of the
code (also because it's in shell). Thus, I think a GPL license on
Urchin wouldn't infect the code being tested.
This is as far as I have gotten with contemplating license changes. For now
we're sticking with the original MIT-style license, but it's easy to change
licenses later.