December 3, 2011

Make It Easy to Help

Strange things happen, and yaks get shaved in the process. I was idly exercising the PyPI JSON interface when I happened across a package called monk. I had no specific interest in this package, but I know something about MongoDB, and monk is an attempt to build a lightweight schema mechanism for it, with record specifications giving default values and validation rules, for example.

I was browsing the API and I noticed a function called monk.manipulation.merged(spec, data). It struck me (since the code deals with MongoDB records) that that function could become a method of the specification object called spec.merge_with(data), or something similar, and that this might be an appropriate topic about which to raise an issue.

Sadly the code repository, which is on BitBucket, won't give me access to the issue tracker, and I can't find an email address for the author, or indeed any other way to contact him. So it’s open source, just not quite as open as I'd like. And it's really not worth checking out a copy and updating the code and making a pull request—I was just reading the documentation, for Pete's sake, and wanted to help. Apparently not this time.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah, that stinks. I think this is his email though:

andy (at) neithere (dot) net

Found it in another of his setup.py.

Steve said...

Thanks, Greg, I'll try that.

Anonymous said...

Hello, I'm the author of the "monk" package.

Thanks for your interest which I wasn't really expecting, especially in a few days after the package was first published, — so I didn't check if the issue tracker was functional, my bad. Now it should. Any feedback is more than welcome.

Thanks again,
Andy

P.S.: thanks to Mike Korobov for the link to this post :)

panos said...

You can try sending a pm via bitbucket. There is a button on the upper right corner: https://bitbucket.org/neithere