Summary of the developer IRC session on May 16th. There were in the chat: k-fish (Karsten) hondzik (Jan) JackShedd (Jack) stunti (Olivier) brr (Bjørn) yoyo (Christian) I'll try to summarize what was discussed. Developer Roles --------------- We talked about who will be doing what. The results can be seen at http://www.k-fish.de/krabutzig/mgw/tasks.html CVS Future ---------- We decided to dump the current 0.7 tree on CVS. 0.6 has become very similar (a lot of changes have been backported) and it is very tedious to maintain two trees at a time. This does _not_ mean that moregroupware will never evolve or go into OO'ing. It will only happen in a more consistent way. Also see the roadmap part. Roadmap ------- We want to release a 0.6.4 on 27th of May. Afterwards the goal is to have 0 bugs (realistically it would be < 5 bugs) and then release 0.6.5. There will be a manual upgrade procedure for 0.6.3 -> 0.6.4 which I will take care of. After 0.6.5 the main focus will be bug requests, and this will someday result in release 1.0 Then we will go on with heavily changing the core (OO'ing, there it is...) and will eventually get 2.0. But that is a long story... Rights Management System ------------------------ A few people expressed that they don't like the current rights management system. We discussed some alternatives and agreed on asking the users. I will set up a survey on sf.net and will announce it on moregroupware.org. Contextual Help System ---------------------- We agreed that this would be good. It should be possible to localize (i.e. translate) it, and it should be adapted to the submenu item currently used when calling help. We will stick with DITA for writing docs, I will try to compile a list of usable XML editors for that purpose. After 0.6.4 I will commit the current help implementation to CVS and will start working on it. XML for Database Schema / SQL portability ----------------------------------------- loge suggested using a technique used at Turbine for setting up the database tables. While this seems to be very flexible, it was not clear whether it would be easily implementable (are there ready-to-use parsers for this, translating to SQL? shall we wait for something similar to appear in ADODB?). There are alternatives, like Metabase, as well. We agreed on "try it with standards". We will try to eliminate all uses of CONCAT and LIMIT and replace them with portable ADODB calls. TYPE="MyISAM" shall be removed to make PostgreSQL happy, and we can safely use FOREIGN KEY (advantages on PostgreSQL, ignored on MySQL). Let's see how far we can get this way... ChangeLog Maintenance --------------------- We will stick to the current use of the ChangeLog file to record details of changes. Everybody should write to that file (!), to make changes more transparent. Minimal System Requirements --------------------------- We will continue to support PHP 4.0.6 for now. When the time is come, we will switch to the new superglobal $_* variables and drop support for 4.0.6. We will continue with the "only standard functions" approach, using only PHP modules/extension that are compiled by default. One exception will probably be IMAP, you will need IMAP compiled into PHP for IMAP support to work (that's future anyway). New modules ----------- A few new modules will be added after 0.6.4 is released: TTS, Outboard, PhoneMsg, FileManager, Notes and new Webmail (?). Some of those will be backported from 0.7 CVS, other are new. Mixed Topics ------------ PDA syncing would be cool. See the log for more on this... All include files will be renamed to *.inc.php for security reasons. We use $HTTP_*_VARS only! Later we can switch to $_* easily. All templates must be named uniquely The following naming convention was agreed on on the mailing list: 1. No need for the language code in the template name - all hard coded strings should go away RSN, right? 2. The module name should be in the template name - to avoid duplicate names, which would be really weird in this case (meaning duplicate module names as well). 3. Add the purpose of the template to the name. This boils down to: _.tpl Tasks arising from this ----------------------- k-fish: 1. Set up survey about rights management system (done). 2. Add Jack to developers (done). 3. Ask emailtotom about progress/motivation (done). 4. Ask Gary about joining in for development (done). 5. Compile developer role table (done). everybody: 1. Check "own" module for non-standard SQL and non-unique template names (important!) 2. Use the ChangeLog 3. Fix bugs... Pending tasks from last session ------------------------------- In the meantime 1. has been solved, 5. and 6. are postponed. Remainder: 2. Update roadmap, make people back off from the webmail, answer some FAQ about filemanager module, ... 3. Complete database abstraction. 4. Fix bugs, fix bugs, fix bugs. Probably a lot of interesting details are missing here, so have a look at the full log if you want the gory stuff. It is available at http://www.k-fish.de/krabutzig/mgw/devtalk-020516.html Karsten