Thanks to all those who've offered help and signed up to the Launchpad group (<https://launchpad.net/~agrip-hackers>). I've mentioned to a few people that I would like to contact them off-list to discuss what they might do to help and some of you have already contacted me. The current problem is co-ordinating a central database of what needs to be done to take the project forward and discussing these ideas and tracking progress. I propose the following...
We can use what Launchpad calls "Blueprints" to track ideas for the project; we can create a blueprint for each outstanding issue and people can select which blueprint they want to address. Examples include switching to a less intrusive Perl distribution than ActiveState on Windows; hosting the website elsewhere and including LDL download links on whatever downloads page we end up having. Blueprints should not be confused with bug reports -- bug reports are filed when someone discovers a defect with our software, whereas blueprints are ideas for new (i.e. currently non-existent) features. Launchpad can track both (and more). The current list of blueprints assigned to AGRIP-Hackers is at <https://blueprints.launchpad.net/~agrip-hackers> (which is accessible from the AGRIP-Hackers overview page linked to above). Currently there's only one and it's very simple; it is to switch to the Strawberry Perl distribution on Windows as this is easier to get onto end-users' machines than making them download the large ActiveState bundle as a separate part of the install. Strawberry can be included inside the AQ download itself. I may add a blueprint to include LDL with all AQ downloads in future too -- this would give people everything they need in one bundle. The point of a blueprint is that one states the idea and then it can be discussed on its merits and then, if a decision to implement it is taken, the progress of the implementation can be tracked. Sebby and I adopted Launchpad partly because it was very accessible compared to the competition at the time. I hope this is still the case and you'll find it easy to edit blueprints. However, this may not be the case, so then we still have this mailing list to fall back on. Perhaps I should add a few blueprints over this week and then you can experiment with the interface to see how you feel about using it and, if you are able to get this far, decide which tasks you'd like to help with. There is a discussion thread associated with each blueprint on Launchpad, so feel free to start posting comments to see how accessible it is. The reason I suggest using Launchpad over a mailing list are as follows. 1. It allows everything to be recorded centrally so one can get an overview of outstanding blueprints (or bugs) and organise them by priority and so on. Discussions on each blueprint or bug are included on the web page that describes them. 2. It stops people being overwhelmed by a discussion about a feature or bug they are not interested in discussing themselves, so it allows individuals to contribute what they can without forcing them to get the whole discussion on every feature. Again, I'm not sure how this will pan out -- though I know the good people at Launchpad have been very keen to maintain the excellent accessibility track record they started with. How do people feel about this? -- Matthew Tylee Atkinson http://mta.agrip.org.uk/ _______________________________________________ AGRIP-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.agrip.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/agrip-discuss
