On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 1:48 PM, Marvin Humphrey <[email protected]> wrote: > 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?
Lets see if we can meet each other half way, and then circle back to updating the site. For starters, whimsy is not monolithic, and different tools are at different places. They likely will be consolidated once the whimsy svn is set up, but that hasn't happened yet; see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-10399 Next, there are steps between step 1 and 2 above. Every tool will need a data source, typically svn or LDAP. The svn files will need to be checked out, and you may already have done so; if so you will need to tell the tool where to find the checkout (different people understandably have different conventions). For LDAP, you will need to configure your machine somewhat. I've put together some 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 If I can get people to try them (in order), indicate how far they got on their own, what changes they feel are needed (feel free to directly commit them and/or submit a pull request), and where they got stuck, I'll try to help. > Marvin Humphrey - Sam Ruby
