[Squeakfoundation]Harvesting infrastructure (was Re: Order of business ...)

[Doug Way]

I sent a somewhat lengthy reply to this last night, but the new email 
client I was trying pretended to send the message, without notifying me 
the smtp server was down and without saving a local copy.  Argh!  >:-(

On Friday, November 15, 2002, at 02:54 AM, danielv@netvision.net.il 
wrote:

> Until we have some automatic infrastructure to pick up everything
> posted, I would not want to commit to us picking everything up - I don't
> want to be enslaved to a work load we can't keep up with.
>
> Pointing the community to what has been gathered, and telling them to
> tell us what they want sounds good.

Yes, I've been thinking the same thing.  Then we could just harvest the 
relatively small amount of important fixes/cleanups that people tell us 
about the second time.  I guess the list of "what has been gathered" is 
simply the last six months or so of Bert's SQFIXES site.  
http://swiki.gsug.org:8080/SQFIXES/

I should probably send out this request for important fixes to the list 
soon.

> What do you think the infrastructure should look like so we can get a
> better process up? given Seaside and related technology, I'm sure
> someone in the community could help us realize this, if we can post a
> clear sketch of minimal, critical functionality for a first release.

I haven't thought too much about how the back-end infrastructure might 
work.  It could be based on SqueakMap or something else.

But we definitely want it to be automated so that 
bugfix/enhancement/refactoring submissions are compiled somewhere with 
no manual effort on our part.

One way to do this would be to simply require that people use a tool 
(either a tool within Squeak, or a web form like with SqueakMap uploads) 
to submit these submissions.  There would be additional benefits in 
requiring that certain file formats and information be included with 
submissions via such a tool (whereas the current submissions are kind of 
a free-for-all, sometimes the formatting is bad, etc.).

I don't think this would be too harsh a requirement for the community.  
An automatically-generated email could still be sent to the squeak-dev 
list, so people would still see fixes/etc coming in.

Then we would want some sort of upload space to exist, maybe just ftp 
space on squeakfoundation.org or something, where the submissions would 
be stored.  The harvesters would need to be able to look at the list of 
submissions, and be able to annotate them somehow as being "approved", 
"rejected", or otherwise commented upon.

This is kind of sounding like something that SqueakMap would be able to 
handle, with some customization.  It would be a separate catalog from 
the usual SM packages, of course.  And the submissions themselves would 
need to be stored somewhere.  But SM would perhaps be good for storing 
the meta-info (annotations, etc.) about each submission.  A special UI 
(different from SMLoader/SMBrowser) would need to be developed for the 
harvesters to use to do the annotating, but it could probably start out 
relatively simple.

Having both the submission tool and the harvesting/browsing tool within 
Squeak would provide opportunities for cool functionality... e.g. my 
ConflictChecker utility could be run on a submission by a simple 
menu-click.

Or there might be other better ways to do this.  I'm just throwing 
around ideas right now, and it's getting a bit late. :)

- Doug