There was a developers meeting last evening at the VPRO. Some items we discussed may be interesting for other people.
1. There will be six developers meeting each year (ones every two months). Rob will propose an agenda. Some days before each meeting, developers will be asked to post issues to be discussed/decided upon on the meeting. After each meeting, there will be a minutes-of-meeting send to the dev-list. The next meeting is already stated at mmbase.org.
2. The html-tree seems to be a show-stopper for the 1.7 release. Michiel, Johannes and Henk will ask Gerard, whether this tree may be updated in the realm of the distro project. If so the html-tree will be restructered and all the pages & examples will get the same style. The new style will be the style of the my_editors, without the colors for the fonts. This simplified my_editors style seems to be the best candidate for the mmbase / admin interface. The style of the new MMBase web site is found to be less useful in this respect. Where it works nicely for a web site, it is too colorfull and not transparent enough for a graphical user interface, examples and documentation.
3. The new email application will replace the present email application. There might be some minor backward compatibility issues. However these issues, do not outweigh the effort we have to go to both offer the old and the new email solution in the 1.7 release.
4. On the meeting it was stressed that development takes place in a community. This means that changes to the MMBase code can only be implemented as a hack or within the scope of a project. Although developers may have the feeling that their good initiatives sometimes are blocked by this rule, it was stressed that it only takes three days to setup a new project. It was proposed to add the name of the maintainer to the header of (new) packages. Before changing something in a specific packages one can the first discuss the planned changes with the maintainer to prevent double work or conflicting changes. There was no decision taken on the "maintainer" issue.
5. Starting with the 1.7 release the MMBase web site will contain the documentation of the last stable release.
Kind regards (on behalf of the MMBase developers), Henk H. & Rob V. (Note: there were no official discicions takes at this dev. meeting.)
