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I would like to open the floor for some discussions about the
recent intertia starting about Plucker's involvement in several other
projects, such as wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Linux Documentation
Project, and others.
What are everyone's feelings about this? Should we start to
converge skills and contributor time to move some of this forward, in a
more-structured fashion? I see a lot of wheels being reinvented over and
over again with Plucker.
If we could congeal that effort into one unified set of goals,
with specific individuals responsible for their own parts, these kinds of
projects could move forward faster and faster than if 10 separate people
were each working independently on their own implementation.
In that context, I would like to propose and ask for volunteers
for the following open issues we've got thus far. Many of us are busy with
our day jobs, children, and other commitments and projects, and can't
spend all of our free time on Plucker.
Here is the short list, volunteers to help out are encouraged:
1.) Plucker documentation..
a.) Update it to current, including 1.8 features
b.) Convert it to SGML
2.) Wikipedia in Plucker format
I've made an enormous amount of progress here, and I have
the whole wikipedia running on my internal devopment
webserver. I've modified the wikipedia source directly, to
output just the Plucker'able components (no toolbox on the
left, no tabs at the top, no menubar at the bottom, and so
on).
Instead of converting the SQL dump itself to pseudo-HTML,
as many of the wiki2html scripts try to do, I am taking
the HTML right out of mysql, and cleaning it up, and
"spidering" the database directly with some intelligent
queries first, instead of spidering the "live" website
directly or converting the SQL code to HTML.
I'm working on removing the unnecessary table elements
from the SQL, in a programatic fashion as well. I've been
working with the wikipedia developers directly, and have
identified lots of places where the upstream wikipedia can
be fixed a little bit better to enhance usability on
non-desktop browser interfaces (text-to-speech devices for
the blind, PDA and cellphone screens, etc.)
I managed to encourage them to put the SQL dumps up over
BitTorrent, and they're testing that in irc as I type this
email. Things are definately happening over there.
That being said, we need to get a list of requirements of
a "Wikipedia on Plucker", before "real" work can start.
That "real work" includes writing our own code/convertors
in the short term, and also helping the upstream
developers of wikipedia improve their code, so we can
continue to use their content on our PDAs.
3.) Project Gutenberg
Many of us have been tinkering with converting the entire
Project Gutenberg collection to Plucker format, including
adding some nice "cover art" for each book, so they look
professional, polished, and commercial.
The problem is that there are 13,516 separate works, as I
type this email, and a good majority of them are formatted
slightly differently, based on the auditor doing the
edits.
I've made some good progress with some Perl code to rewrap
and reflow the text, add paragraph markers where they make
sense, add italics around "quoted material", and so on,
but... I'm only one person, and my time is dwindling
rapidly, now that I have a daughter to take care of.
Is anyone interested in this venture? The goal is that ALL
of Project Gutenberg, converted to Plucker format, will be
available from the Plucker website, in a searchable,
categorized format.
4.) Ebook contributions
Thanks to some who have emailed me samples and other
converted ebooks, I will be updating the main website with
the new works.
..but we need more!
5.) Reorganize the "download" page on the Plucker website
I'm guilty here, again due to my dwindling free time. We
need to reorganize the download page on the Plucker
website before the next release. We have a LOT of
different downloads available, and for users, it can get
confusing.
Desktop? Windows? Linux? Java? Python? Viewer? Hi-res?
I need volunteers who are good with usability, to help me
reformat/redesign that page, so that the downloads and the
descriptive text surrounding them makes sense to the end
users. With 88 files at each release (zip, tarball,
torrent, and so on), it gets very unweildly, very fast.
6.) Linux Documentation Project in Plucker format
The LDP converts their documents to Plucker format, but
they aren't as optimized as they can be. This includes
converting them with category information included,
compression, images where necessary, and so on.
7.) Bug hunt!
Many bugs listed in the bugtracker (bugs.plkr.org) have
been there for quite some time, while the reporters have
gone astray. We need some of those unclosed/unresolved
bugs to be tested, and verified to be "real" bugs. If they
no longer exist in the current 1.8 or CVS code, they
should be marked as fixed or resolved.
This means we need people to try out the scenarios listed
there for bugs, and add their success or failure, so we
can get a better idea of which ones are really bugs, and
which ones are not.
There are quite a few other projects that can use the help of the
community, and I appeal to you to help us out a bit, if you can. The more
things we can get done, the faster and more mature Plucker can become.
Quite a few development-level tasks need some volunteers and
testers as well. I will try to gather those up and post that to the
plucker-dev list for those interested in helping out on that front.
If anyone has other projects/ideas they'd like to include, feel
free to add them to this list. I have all of these written down, and will
assign volunteers to the list as they wish.
Thanks everyone.
d.
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