Free debate software for linux

aterr is an open source threaded forum system; allowing registered visitors to express their opinions, discuss topics, and debate with other visitors.
A threaded forum system differs from regular, flat forum systems in that once posted, a thread can fork, allowing visitors to reply directly to other posts.
aterr project also provides a customisable permissions system, the ability to nest forums, and moderation tools.
Main features:
User features
- Threaded forums - Posts are made in a logical manner, underneath the post they are referring to.
- Bookmarked threads - Threads can be bookmarked; when new posts are made you are immediately aware.
- Secure - The forums are developed with security as the top priority.
- Post tracking - aterr remembers which posts you have read and will display in a different colour any posts you have not read.
- Valid XHTML and CSS - aterr is designed in accordance with web standards, allowing it to be displayed correctly in any browser.
- Email notification - aterr can optionally send you emails when people reply to threads you have bookmarked.
- Atom/RSS feeds - Atom and RSS feeds are available for all public forums, showing the latest threads posted in a forum.
- Human-friendly URLs - If supported by the web server, aterr will use user-friendly URLs which make sense
Admin features
- Permissions - Creating private forums is simple and powerful with the permissions system.
- Simple yet powerful administration panel - The administration panel has two modes, simple and advanced. Simple allows for fast creation of forums, advanced allows fine-tuning of user permissions.
- Nested forums - Creating sub forums is easy.
- Simple install script - Just enter the database information and your desired username/password and aterr will be installed.
- Approval of posts - All posts made to a forum can be optionally pre-moderated (they must be approved by a moderator before they are displayed to others).
- Moving posts & threads - Whole threads, or individual posts and their followups can be moved to other forums.
- Stickies - Stickies can be created; a thread which is stuck appears at the top of the forum.
- Locked threads - A thread can be locked, preventing any replies from being made.
- Report posts - Posts can be reported to moderators, reported posts show up differently to moderators who can take action based on the report.

perlhack is a Perl module that will show you how to hack at the Perl internals.

This document attempts to explain how Perl development takes place, and ends with some suggestions for people wanting to become bona fide porters.
The perl5-porters mailing list is where the Perl standard distribution is maintained and developed. The list can get anywhere from 10 to 150 messages a day, depending on the heatedness of the debate. Most days there are two or three patches, extensions, features, or bugs being discussed at a time.

A searchable archive of the list is at either:

http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/

or

http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/

List subscribers (the porters themselves) come in several flavours. Some are quiet curious lurkers, who rarely pitch in and instead watch the ongoing development to ensure theyre forewarned of new changes or features in Perl. Some are representatives of vendors, who are there to make sure that Perl continues to compile and work on their platforms. Some patch any reported bug that they know how to fix, some are actively patching their pet area (threads, Win32, the regexp engine), while others seem to do nothing but complain. In other words, its your usual mix of technical people.

Over this group of porters presides Larry Wall. He has the final word in what does and does not change in the Perl language. Various releases of Perl are shepherded by a "pumpking", a porter responsible for gathering patches, deciding on a patch-by-patch, feature-by-feature basis what will and will not go into the release. For instance, Gurusamy Sarathy was the pumpking for the 5.6 release of Perl, and Jarkko Hietaniemi was the pumpking for the 5.8 release, and Rafael Garcia-Suarez holds the pumpking crown for the 5.10 release.
In addition, various people are pumpkings for different things. For instance, Andy Dougherty and Jarkko Hietaniemi did a grand job as the Configure pumpkin up till the 5.8 release. For the 5.10 release H.Merijn Brand took over.

Larry sees Perl development along the lines of the US government: theres the Legislature (the porters), the Executive branch (the pumpkings), and the Supreme Court (Larry). The legislature can discuss and submit patches to the executive branch all they like, but the executive branch is free to veto them. Rarely, the Supreme Court will side with the executive branch over the legislature, or the legislature over the executive branch. Mostly, however, the legislature and the executive branch are supposed to get along and work out their differences without impeachment or court cases.

You might sometimes see reference to Rule 1 and Rule 2. Larrys power as Supreme Court is expressed in The Rules:

Larry is always by definition right about how Perl should behave. This means he has final veto power on the core functionality.

Larry is allowed to change his mind about any matter at a later date, regardless of whether he previously invoked Rule 1.

Got that? Larry is always right, even when he was wrong. Its rare to see either Rule exercised, but they are often alluded to.

New features and extensions to the language are contentious, because the criteria used by the pumpkings, Larry, and other porters to decide which features should be implemented and incorporated are not codified in a few small design goals as with some other languages. Instead, the heuristics are flexible and often difficult to fathom. Here is one persons list, roughly in decreasing order of importance, of heuristics that new features have to be weighed against:

Does concept match the general goals of Perl?

These havent been written anywhere in stone, but one approximation is:

1. Keep it fast, simple, and useful.
2. Keep features/concepts as orthogonal as possible.
3. No arbitrary limits (platforms, data sizes, cultures).
4. Keep it open and exciting to use/patch/advocate Perl everywhere.
5. Either assimilate new technologies, or build bridges to them.

Where is the implementation?

All the talk in the world is useless without an implementation. In almost every case, the person or people who argue for a new feature will be expected to be the ones who implement it. Porters capable of coding new features have their own agendas, and are not available to implement your (possibly good) idea.

Backwards compatibility

Its a cardinal sin to break existing Perl programs. New warnings are contentious--some say that a program that emits warnings is not broken, while others say it is. Adding keywords has the potential to break programs, changing the meaning of existing token sequences or functions might break programs.

Could it be a module instead?

Perl 5 has extension mechanisms, modules and XS, specifically to avoid the need to keep changing the Perl interpreter. You can write modules that export functions, you can give those functions prototypes so they can be called like built-in functions, you can even write XS code to mess with the runtime data structures of the Perl interpreter if you want to implement really complicated things. If it can be done in a module instead of in the core, its highly unlikely to be added.

Is the feature generic enough?

Is this something that only the submitter wants added to the language, or would it be broadly useful? Sometimes, instead of adding a feature with a tight focus, the porters might decide to wait until someone implements the more generalized feature. For instance, instead of implementing a "delayed evaluation" feature, the porters are waiting for a macro system that would permit delayed evaluation and much more.

Does it potentially introduce new bugs?

Radical rewrites of large chunks of the Perl interpreter have the potential to introduce new bugs. The smaller and more localized the change, the better.

Does it preclude other desirable features?

A patch is likely to be rejected if it closes off future avenues of development. For instance, a patch that placed a true and final interpretation on prototypes is likely to be rejected because there are still options for the future of prototypes that havent been addressed.

Is the implementation robust?

Good patches (tight code, complete, correct) stand more chance of going in. Sloppy or incorrect patches might be placed on the back burner until the pumpking has time to fix, or might be discarded altogether without further notice.

Is the implementation generic enough to be portable?

The worst patches make use of a system-specific features. Its highly unlikely that nonportable additions to the Perl language will be accepted.

Is the implementation tested?

Patches which change behaviour (fixing bugs or introducing new features) must include regression tests to verify that everything works as expected. Without tests provided by the original author, how can anyone else changing perl in the future be sure that they havent unwittingly broken the behaviour the patch implements? And without tests, how can the patchs author be confident that his/her hard work put into the patch wont be accidentally thrown away by someone in the future?

Is there enough documentation?

Patches without documentation are probably ill-thought out or incomplete. Nothing can be added without documentation, so submitting a patch for the appropriate manpages as well as the source code is always a good idea.

Is there another way to do it?

Larry said "Although the Perl Slogan is Theres More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something". This is a tricky heuristic to navigate, though--one mans essential addition is another mans pointless cruft.

Does it create too much work?

Work for the pumpking, work for Perl programmers, work for module authors, ... Perl is supposed to be easy.

Patches speak louder than words

Working code is always preferred to pie-in-the-sky ideas. A patch to add a feature stands a much higher chance of making it to the language than does a random feature request, no matter how fervently argued the request might be. This ties into "Will it be useful?", as the fact that someone took the time to make the patch demonstrates a strong desire for the feature.

If youre on the list, you might hear the word "core" bandied around. It refers to the standard distribution. "Hacking on the core" means youre changing the C source code to the Perl interpreter. "A core module" is one that ships with Perl.

The Circle is an open source scalable decentralized peer to peer application. What does that mean? Well, theres no central authority running the show. No entry taxes either, no censorship, and (in theory) no weak point which can break the whole system.
No one even owns the source code. As long as there is one Circle peer running, anywhere in the world, theres still a network.
Main features:
- Share files
- Send instant messages and chat IRC-style
- Put together your own personalized, trust based news service
- Proxy Debian package downloads
The Circle is written in Python. It runs on Linux and Windows. (in fact, there is very little operating system specific code, so it will most likely work on any system that supports Python)
Scalability
At the core of the Circle is a decentralized hashtable, or "Chord". This table allows users to search for files in logarithmic time, based on keywords. This means that the Circle does not have the scalability problems of Gnutella style network (such as Kazaa, eDonkey), while also avoiding the need for a central server and therefore a single point of failure. Details of its operation are given in the "Technical Details" section below.
Privacy
The Circle does have the ability to post fully anonymous news a la Freenet. However, the file-sharing protocol isnt entirely anonymous. People will be able to work out your IP address.
In order to protect user privacy, the Circle includes a Digital Rights Management system. Although everybody can search your files by their keywords, you may choose which users are authorized to download them. An unauthorized third party has access only to the names of your files, not to their content. Needless to say, we expect you to use this system in order to prevent copyright infringement, while allowing private copy.
Note: If we become aware that you are trying to share snuff or child pornography, we will be able to work out your IP and from that your location and identity, and report you to the police and/or your ISP. Snuff and child pornography are things we think any reasonable person considers to be evil (its an issue quite separate from the debate over copyright).

xmppjca project is a JCA 1.5 resource Adapter for managing connections to a XMPP (aka jabber) server from a J2EE application server (for instance JBoss). The resource adapter has been written to conform to the JCA 1.5 specification but only JBoss has been tested. The RA uses the smack API to connect to XMPP servers.

The connector supports multiple connections to multiple servers and provides an abstraction of the underlying smack api that in addition to connection management provides support for extensions from su-smack which includes support for JEP-0060 aka publish subscribe.

Currently the RA only supports container managed security. Future versions will support bean managed security using JAAS. The goal is eventually support single-sign-on using SASL+GSSAPI to XMPP servers which support this mechanism.

Currently the RA does not support transactions. The precise way in which this will be supported is a matter of debate.

Installation

The project consists of two parts - xmppjca and xmppjca-spec. Build both artifacts. Deploy the rar-file in your J2EE-server. In a standard JBoss- installation this means copying the rar-file to $JBOSS_HOME/server/default/deploy. The xmppjca-spec-< version >.jar should be placed in the classpath of clients who need to use the resource adapter. In a standard JBoss-installation the easiest way is to copy the file to $JBOSS_HOME/server/default/lib. In most situations the application server will hotdeploy the rar-file but not the jar- file so a restart is needed whenever you update the spec-file.