Volunteers wanted for new project

[Tim Fletcher]

> The other day I wanted to see if anybody had written a parser for
> C in Erlang.  I did not know of such a parser, so I Googled a bit
> and turned up nothing.

I'm not too surprised by that, an Erlang C parser would seem to be
quite a "niche" thing.

I've found that using the "erlang-" prefix in project names makes them
easier to discover via search engines. That won't be of interest to
big projects like Riak/CouchDB who need the marketing, but for
"boring" library code the "erlang-" prefix works well. If there was a
http://github.com/joearms/erlang-c-parser, you would be able to find
that easily via Google.

> Now I'm hardly an Erlang newby so if I can't find it (or even know
> about it) how can a real Erlang newby find anything?

I think the difficulty is due to the fragmentation. There's the
"Unsupported User Contributions" on erlang.org, there's Jungerl,
there's Trapexit, there's code on Github/Bitbucket etc. Everyone's
doing their own thing. Contrast that with the Node community, who have
a single wiki page listing 3rd party modules:

http://wiki.github.com/ry/node/modules

> What I want is a "report a resource" thing on the web.

Functionality wise, that's not too different from a community
maintained wiki. The hard things are non-technical: getting everyone
to use it and keeping it up-to-date. I think it might help more to
combine some of the existing resources first though, before adding new
ones.

> This is why this should be a collaborative effort - rather than
> a one man hack - this is to *force* collaboration between
> the couch and the rabbits of the Erlang world.

That's a great aim. I'd love to help with a project along these lines,
but i'm not entirely sold on this particular idea.

Tim