Hi, Ian... I'm sending this message to the mailing list, with the intent that what I say and your reply to be public so that it can be archived for future reference.
I joined the mailing list because I'm one of the "insatiably curious" people you mentioned on your website. I'm also itching to contribute to the COLA system, in whatever ways I can. For me, that means advocacy, writing documentation, supporting other users and developers, submitting patches and coding new features that interest me and are in line with the project vision. I understand from what I've seen of your writing and other projects that you a highly skilled programmer, designer, and researcher. I also understand that you are working for VPRI on what must be very focused tasks without much leeway to meander endlessly as other free software projects are wont to do. I, on the other hand, have more enthusiasm than skill, but have a lot of spare time on my hands in which to tinker and learn. I have been looking for something exactly like COLA for the last 15 years or so, and this is the first project that is both completely ambitious yet not flawed by design (as far as I can tell by my experience). It truly is an architecture that looks eminently teachable and flexible. So, this brings me to the point... I know that for a free software project to thrive, there must be a rapid stream of communication, accessible over the Internet. The buzz of people collaborating needs to be there to provide the transparency so that other people will want to get involved. I'm quite sure that COLA, despite whatever shortcomings are in the currently public implementation phase (Jolt/Pepsi), is at a point where it would benefit from and be capable of sustaining contributions from outsiders. I would like to jump right in and help get that process going. I presume that the reason you've been silent in response to my earlier requests (various bug fixes, the unanswered questions on LtU, no SVN commits since 2007-09-20) has been just because you're deep into the implementation of Coke and don't have the attention to spare to jobs that can be done by other people. So, I'm stepping up to the plate. I've immersed myself in SVN r332, and made what I consider to be some changes that are both useful and increase COLA's flexibility. I like these changes, but I'm not certain you would adopt them. I think the best way to accomodate these different needs from the code base (your highly focused minimalism, and my flighty expansions) is to take advantage of a distributed version control tool, to manage the patches more effectively and make them easier for us to move back and forth. In so doing, I will also have full ownership of my own branch, can encourage other people to use it, and answer questions about it authoritatively. For that reason, I've adopted Mercurial as my source control tool (http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/ - it's friendly, safer and simpler than C/C++-implemented SCM's, and cross-platform). I am planning to continually import the COLA SVN tree, with my additions separated cleanly into different branches. If you or anybody else is interested in my repository, you can find instructions on how to get started with it at: http://fig.org/ocean/ocean.html ["Ocean" is my codename for this COLA branch.] In doing so, I hope to lower the barrier for people to contribute to COLA by being as responsive as possible to people who have patches for my branch, then helping refine and advocate them to be included in the mainline. I will be sure to mention each of these potential contributions on [email protected], so that you can decide if you want to integrate them with the mainline. Please let me know if you would like to see patches in general, or just upon request. Also, would you prefer future discussion of my branch to be held on [email protected], or my own mailing list? Thanks, and I look forward to hearing your reaction, -- Michael FIG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> //\ http://michael.fig.org/ \// _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
