What I liked is that Marvin had 1 job: send reminders. As a general rule of thumb, I dislike large monolithic platforms because they become much too unwieldy, hence my "hesitation" in folding it into Whimsy. But it is obvious that that position is no longer tenable, esp when even when Marvin does its job correctly, it gets "blamed" for "incorrect" postings and instead of fixing what exists, people decide to recreate the wheel... But, after all, if that's what people wish to do, who am I to get in the way :)
> On Sep 30, 2015, at 10:14 AM, Sam Ruby <ru...@intertwingly.net> wrote: > > On 09/30/2015 09:24 AM, Jim Jagielski wrote: >> Please kill Marvin the bot. Sam wants to take over its functionality >> within Whimsy and I see no reason to continue any work at all in >> Marvin. People prefer adding stuff to Whimsy instead of fixing >> Marvin, which is fine by me. >> >> So just trash Marvin totally and completely... I will no >> longer work on it or bother with it at all. > > First, a big thanks for maintaining Marvin to this point! I'm aware of how > thankless that job can be, and how it often involves taking responsibility > for fixing things that are outside your control. > > - - - > > Second: Gulp. The biggest "problem" with Marvin the bot is that it has > (had?) one primary maintainer. A problem that Whimsy shares. > > I plan to address that problem. > > For the near term, my focus will be on making it possible for people to run > individual whimsy tools on their own machine (Mac OS/X, Linux, docker > container, Vagrant VM) so that people can try out changes before contributing > them back. > > With respect to the incubator, what I would like to see is podlings > integrated into both the roster[1] and agenda[2] tools. > > I'm currently rewriting the roster tool to take advantage of things I learned > with the latest agenda rewrite. The goal is to make the roster tool totally > read/write: there will no longer be a need to ssh into people.apache.org to > run a Perl script to update committee info. Everything should be doable from > a web interface. > > What this also means is that cron jobs will tend to be small scripts. Take a > list of items (a list which you can see using the web interface, for example, > a list of board agenda items which are missing) and perform an action (like > send an email). > > When this is done there should never again be a need to edit podlings.xml > with a text editor. > > I'm also planning to take the following to heart: http://s.apache.org/hZ > > As applied to the incubator, what I plan to do is to rough in podling support > and leave it to others to fill in the details. > > - - - > > Places to get started (in preferred order): > > https://svn.apache.org/repos/infra/infrastructure/trunk/projects/whimsy/README > > https://github.com/rubys/whimsy-agenda#readme > > https://svn.apache.org/repos/infra/infrastructure/trunk/projects/whimsy/www/test/roster > > Preferred place for discussion: > > dev@whimsical.apache.org > > - Sam Ruby > > [1] https://whimsy.apache.org/roster/ > [2] https://whimsy.apache.org/board/agenda/
