First drawbacks of the contribution process

[amivanoff]

We received the first "not from the repository maintainers" contribution. Thank you @jeswr!

• 12

• 13

• 14

There are some minor issues with the contribution from my point of view. And it could be used to improve our contribution process.

We ended up here with some "shared implicit style conventions" which makes it hard to prepare, review and accept pull requests from the community.

Some examples below from this contribution:

• From PR #13 (contribution highlighted in red rectangle).

• From PR #14 (contribution highlighted in red rectangle).

Some mismatches with our current style conventions:

1. The "Validators" lists are sorted by programming language by @VladimirAlexiev. Maybe we should state this explicitly for readers and contributors? At the top of the section or at the beginning of the README? Or in the Guidelines?

2. Personally, I think it has too much badges. Maybe we should state the recommended format for a list item too?

   • We are using only two badges:
     • "last stable version" (from any most common binary repository or even GH Releases)
     • and "last repo activity" (is the project dead or alive).
   • license info -- we are using just text in code quotes. Not sure is it worth to use a badge for a license info like in #14. The downside of badges here -- the text is not searchable
   • programming language -- we are using just text in code quotes
   • build status and dependencies info -- this info is an overkill?
   • badge for documentation -- we are using hyperlinks, maybe it is better then badges?

Open questions:

• Should we refine our current list item format?
• Where is the best place to put our style advices like "list sorting", "list item format", "approach with badges"? In The Contribution Guidelines only? Or some advices/descriptions should go to the README?

[amivanoff]

Another addition to the mismatches and a candidate to the style guideline:

3. In the description, too many URL links to general things or common to all section's items (like RDF, SHACL, ShEx, or Java), could hurt list readability. Only meaningful item-specific things should be made URL links.

rudof - a library that implements Shape Expressions, SHACL, DCTAP, and other technologies in the RDF ecosystem. The library is implemented in Rust

[jeswr]

Can I make a somewhat drastic suggestion - have the list described in RDF and generate this README using those RDF descriptions.

[VladimirAlexiev]

I agree the badges are a bit too many. And I agree that of all hyperlinks about rudof, only rudof and DCTAP should remain (because that's more obscure than SHACL/SHEX)