[350] in BarnOwl Developers
Some notes from talking with Sam
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nelson Elhage)
Thu Oct 29 18:05:11 2009
Resent-From: nelhage@mit.edu
Resent-To: barnowl-dev-mtg@charon.mit.edu
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2007 16:19:26 -0500
From: Nelson Elhage <nelhage@MIT.EDU>
To: dirty-owl-hackers@MIT.EDU
(For those of you who haven't heard, I'm working for Sam on getting
owl jabber support finished and releasable over this IAP)
We met today to discuss what our priorities are for getting things
does, and what needs to happen. We split these up essentially into the
three categories of getting all the basic jabber support there,
getting the forked owl to be releasable, and doing the work to
encourage a development community so that I'm not the only one working
on this, and so that once I graduate and/or become lame, barn-owl
doesn't stagnate like owl appears to have.
We would like as many of you as possible to start using owl as your
primary or even sole jabber client as soon as possible, so we can get
bug reports. If there are features you still critically need, let me
know, and I will try to make them high priority. I've pushed an
addition to the makefile so that ``make install'' will now actually
install the bundled perl modules. You will need to install several
perl modules by hand -- they're listed in the README, and are all
available off CPAN and as Debian packages.
My notes from talking to Sam follow.
- Nelson
1) Basic Jabber functionality
* MUST default style
* MUST option to accept/deny sub requests
* MUST MUC presence
* SHOULD shortname support
* MUST smartnarrow
* MUST think about priority & status
* multi-user chat
* MAY More extensive room configuration
* MUST show error messages
2) Getting it releasable
* choose a product name (probably barn-owl)
* package renaming? (owl:: -> BarnOwl::)
* use different dotfiles? Make some symbol available for version detection?
* zero-configuration
* split up jabber.pl somehow
* make install should install the perl/ dir
* add make fixdeps, make checkdeps for CPAN modules (or bundle them?)
3) Encouraging development community
* code style
* modules / .pl / pars ?
* It'd be nice to not have everything in one huge file.
* namespace issues (we currently use owl_FOO, I'd like to use owl::)
* addbuddy aim v. jroster v. .... (command consistency)
* protocol/core boundaries
* core v. data files (perlwrap.pm: linked-in, data directory, PAR?)
* documentation (help for commands, getting started guide)
* install it somewhere on athena (builds + svn repo)
* locker, svn, mail lists, bugtrackers, etc.
* athena v. something like sourceforge that would make it easy to
hand out commit bits to non-MIT people
* Where to put a bugtracker if we host it on Athena? scripts? An IS&T machine?
* C / perl abstraction barrier
* C shouldn't know about jabber at all
* logging should move to perl at some point
* get rid of OWL_MESSAGE_TYPE constants?
