All Developers, please read.

[chriss]

Hi,

some posts above I offered to setup a SVN repository for the sources. I'm surprised nobody commented on that. Did I miss something, like some repository somewhere else? Anyway, I did setup the repository by now; unfortunately it is nothing more than the 0704 sources from bittorrent with the following policy:

• anonymous read access
• authentication is required for modifications/commits (anybody who wants to become a developer?)
• Traffic limited to 50GB/month @ 2MBit/s (25 kBit/s when exceeded)

My suggestions for the next steps (before I make the URL public) are

• Can somebody tell me, if there is another repository?
• Can we get diffs of the two updates to be merged into the sources?
• Create a policy on how to work with the repository
• Make a list of developers and entitle a maintainer, to merge branches back to the trunk

Cheers,
Chriss

[chewi]

Awesome, that you got a repository...
But do you think that 50GB will be enough ? I would guess, that if only the people writing on the wiki and forum wil do an initial checkout, those 50gb will not be enough. Or do the extra gb not generate additional cost but "only" limit the bandwidth ? 25kBit will make a checkout take

My suggestion is, that for now a few svn-maintainers should be voted. Definately not too many, maybe 1 or 2. The rest could upload their patches as diffs to some php-skript on a website as a tar.gz with a discription.
Alternatively, we could add the status "pending for repository" when there is a solution to a bug in the mantis-system...

Best regards, Chewi

[chriss]

Chewi,

But do you think that 50GB will be enough ?

Probably not, it's only for the beginning. I have to move some things around and than I can increase the traffic to ~300GB, I think. At the moment there won't be any extra cost (i've calculated the speed so that it fits into the maximum free traffic).
IMHO, there will be very high traffic during the first days, because everybody is donwloading the stuff. If I had a list of volunteering developers, maybe they can get the URLs first to have the chance to use full speed  for downloading.

Anyway, a discussion about the repository and how to go on has already started here: http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=2809.0#new

a few svn-maintainers should be voted

Great idea. I already thought about having maintainers for the single modules and something like a release manager/overall maintainer to merge the branches back into the trunk.
Let's start another thread to see who wants to get involved...

Cheers,
Chriss

[chriss]

BTW, it seems that some people (like danielk) have already talked to Paul. I think that we should honor Paul's effort as well and that he should also give a statement on who should be maintaining what.

[nite_man]

Hi,

My company is owner of a big datacenter in Amsterdam. So, we ca provide a hosting for SVN repository and ISO for free. We're going to use LMCE as a home automation system. And we'd like to help it to grow. Just let me know what you need.

[Matthew]

A good dump from Paul and anyone else familiar with the features and sources would be a map of all of LMCE's features, to the code that supports those features. Even just the list of all features would be a good inventory to start from. Or even just all the source files grouped into which feature groups they each support.

Hi all, I'm a newbie here, but reading this thread has sparked my interest. I'm very interested in helping out with organization and documentation. I'm not a developer, though I do so some amateur coding, but I have done technical documentation for hardware related issues. I generally have my evenings free and can generally also bust out some time at work.

My interest in LinuxMCE stems from wanting to create a touchscreen video intercom/background music system for a small office environment. A lot of the features in LinuxMCE are not really needed in this sort of implementation, but the feature set is so rich and the system far more stable than anything else I've tried, that it's the only system I can really consider for my project. I expect that as I become more familiar with the system that I will want to offer other services to the office staff, such as video on demand, room light control, etc.

Let me know if I can be of use.

Matt Armistead
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

2) Find someone who's good at writing docs, ORG charts and other tools to document LinuxMCE, ...

Yes, i found something i can help with. Have some experency with making flowdiagram's. So ORG (i hope it stends for organisation?) charts are no problem for me. Tell me what te make and i can try to make it.

Niels v/d Spek

Are Matt and Niels still offering to help the documentation? Can the two (or just one) of you take ownership of that feature/code map, find people to populate it, and then turn that into readable (initial) descriptions and API/codepath diagrams?

I've been updating the wiki as I figure out LMCE features and functions, but I'd be a lot more productive with a schematic index to the system as a guide. I'm sure others wanting to help would find it the same.

[rstuart]

Can anyone give an update on whats been happening as a result of this thread? Obviously Daniel has been appointed as community liaison but has there been much progress in the dev and documentation?

I have the skills and willingness to contribute to the project, but like so many before me I find it hard to get started with this project. I think the need to have improved developer documentation for this project is an important one. With better documentation more developers will know where to start and things will start happening at a rate of knots.

An important document to get written would be a system architecture document, that describes the whole system, not just the DCERouter (I'm referring specifically here to the boot scripts and other distro specific details like the sources list pointing to the hard disk) all the way through to the messaging protocol used by the DCERouter. While it is undoubtedly a big task, i think its i probably essential to get started.

Has someone been appointed as head of documentation and have efforts already started to make this happen? I notice plenty of people have posted on the contacts page saying they are offering documentation. We seem to have the people power, we just need the organisation.

[bulek]

Hi,

I'll try to quickly describe current status of LMCe, so you won't loose your energy. IMHO right now, we're all waiting for new release that will I hope also bring public code repository, so developers could start contributing, compiling, etc....

So don't be disapointed if there will not be many responses...

HTH,

regards,

Bulek.

[danielk]

<i>Can anyone give an update on whats been happening as a result of this thread? Obviously Daniel has been appointed as community liaison but has there been much progress in the dev and documentation?</i>

We've been working on getting a developer's sqlcvs running and getting the repository compile to be self-hosted on a LinuxMCE machine. sqlcvs documentation has been written, but not much other developer documentation. In particular if you want to help it would be great if you could assemble a script and a doxygen config to generate documentation from the source (which has plenty of doxygen documentation.)

FYI You can check out the latest public sources by following the directions at http://svn.charonmedia.org, I will be syncing these from the sources being used for 0710 soon.

<i>An important document to get written would be a system architecture document, that describes the whole system, not just the DCERouter (I'm referring specifically here to the boot scripts and other distro specific details like the sources list pointing to the hard disk) all the way through to the messaging protocol used by the DCERouter. While it is undoubtedly a big task, i think its i probably essential to get started.</i>

I agree, but you should probably get started with a few of the major components before writing an overview. Getting the doxygen documentation going should be the first step, so that we can refer to this from the overview document.

<i>Has someone been appointed as head of documentation and have efforts already started to make this happen?</i>
No. As soon someone picks up the baton and starts working on it they will become the  documentation coordinator.

[cbynaker]

Greetings,

I had been interested in running doxygen on the lmce distribution on the Charonmedia SVN server and took a run at it on last Wednesday. I just upgraded the memory in my test box and it churned through much faster earlier today pointing at the "lmce/src" directory. The To-Do list was not very large.

What do you envision the script needing to do. Is it for customization of the default output.

I have observed a need to expand the documention some in order to make it a better fit for those not as intimate with the code or operation and setup of this huge appliance. A good example of that is why has someone not created a recipe for creating a new template for a not so popular Audio Visual Receiver controlled by IR. You find out quickly that the "channel:port" does not get added automatically. A search through our wiki turned up the answer which turned out to be a trivial task. This leads me to believe that we need an Integration area that specializes in how to configure addons and behaviors once lmce is installed. It is encouraging to see the number and quality of the documents added to the lmce wiki recently.

Charles