Hi Axel, I'm glad to hear you chime in on this topic. Your experience at Mozilla will be very helpful for us here!
Axel Hecht wrote: > [snip] > = Developer man power > - MIT > - Open Sourcers > > I think relying on the MIT for coding shouldn't go much longer than > David being there. I personally think that going the Open Source way > will add more thrust to exhibit and timeline, and I might actually > caugh up a patch, eventually. > It would be wonderful to be able to garner more open source contribution. I agree that the less I am involved, the more other capable developers will likely jump in. Making that transition, however, is a challenge. If not done correctly, we might find our crowd dispersing altogether. > As for Frankenmonsters and bad code, there's a well established > process to fix that, it's called peer review. David's not going to > fall off the planet, thanks to his new employer, so there is no need > or reason for arbitrary folks checking in arbitrary stuff without him > looking at it first. > http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Getting_your_patch_in_the_tree is > how a big project like Mozilla handles this, I bet that we can figure > something out that looks less scary. I expect that new reviewers grow > out of the community that's contributing patches, and there's some > level in here somewhere where getting commit priviledges is a good > idea > That does look a little scary. :-) How did that document start out? The wiki history didn't go that far back. We sometimes want to do some research on these tools, e.g., creating a visualization extension for bioinformatics. We have inexperienced (undergrad) students working on them, and it would be nice not to scare them away. > = Source hosting > - MIT > - google > - SF > > I'd go for the level of service here, in particular in terms of bug > tracking systems. SF.net is sadly enough dog-slow, ad-plastered, and > low-featured. I haven't worked on google code myself, but google > usually doesn't have performance problems, at least. I'm not sure if > MIT would offer to continue to host the sources, or even grant non-MIT > folks write access. > I would definitely count SF out, too. > = Web hosting > - MIT > - google > > I really think that SF.net is out of question here, their latency is > just yucky. It'd be nice if the MIT could continue to host the > projects, as that would ease our lives and we wouldn't have to get all > our urls changed. I'm not really sure what the requirements are, > though. > I think MIT can continue the hosting for a while. But this is not a long-term solution. > Are exhibit and timeline the only projects that are affected? We've > seen more messages about structural changes at simile, so maybe it'd > be interesting to see if there's a hosting solution out there that's > somewhat independent from MIT, but is supported by it in some way. > Other players interested in innovation on the internet might be able > to chime in, too. > We have quite a number of projects in our SVN: http://simile.mit.edu/repository/ There are also live services, like Babel and the map marker painter servlet. > = Incorporated projects > > I haven't seen this being mentioned, but what's the relationship to > the tooling libs, like SimileAjax and friends? > SimileAjax in particular is more of a code refactoring (from Timeline, Exhibit, Timeplot, Timegrid) than an API intended for general use. > = Testing > > To make exhibit more suitable for open source hacking, having tests would be > of great help. Anyone with an idea on how to define those? If not, I could > poke jresig or other mozillians for ideas. We started to look at a few options for testing, but for those projects I'm responsible for I haven't gotten to write test suites. Please poke jresig and other mozillians! As I understand, Mozillians other than you are also using Exhibit. http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/granParadisoUI/icons/iconInventory.html Actually, it'd be *awesome* if a Javascript guru like jresig would be involved in the next phase of Exhibit in general... David _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
