On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 7:14 AM, Sam Ruby <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. +1 to focus on this. I spent an hour or so trying to figure out how to get started with whimsy, with the goal of trying to figure out where a reminders tool might go, but I haven't yet wrapped my head around it. It seems like there are a bunch of gnarly dependencies. For people whose Ruby skills are minimal or rusty or non-existent -- including myself and most potential contributors to Whimsy -- that's a high hurdle. What would be ideal is to support the following workflow: 0. (Install ruby/rake, if not bundled with OS) 1. Checkout whimsy from source control. 2. Tinker with source code. 3. Run `rake test`. 4. Submit contribution. Accomplished software devs can fake their way through modifying Ruby source code with the help of compiler errors, even if they don't know the language well. But if people have to install a bunch of dependencies using domain-specific build tools rather than pure version control commands, that's a much more significant barrier to entry. For now, how about a 1-page crude static HTML website for whimsical.apache.org which describes where all the source code lives? Marvin Humphrey
