Letter to the Community: LinuxMCE 0810 - The Cold Honest Reality

[los93sol]

Valent:  Wierdbeard has it right on this one.  The companies you are talking about have contributed back to the project and are active members.  Please don't try to flip it and turn this thread on the people contributing, instead of pointing fingers you should accept the fact that you CAN do something.

My contributions aren't anything too crazy, I worked with Thom on the Vista alarm panel device and have done some documenting in the wiki.  Nothing crazy, but I have at least started in the direction of helping the project and will be getting more active since things have calmed down.  I've also donated for development of other devices as well.  Whether it is donating for support of a device or donating to say thanks, it is something I think every single user here is has gone beyond just trying out the software should want to do.

[nascarfan1956]

I have a suggestion for development moving forward.  Wouldn't it make sense to develop future new versions around the LTS versions of Kubuntu/Ubuntu  which are on a 2 year cycle instead of being bombarded with questions about the next new version every 6 months?

[tschak909]

We are still trying to find the best possible development cycle. For now, we've decided to target the october releases every year.

-Thom

[Marie.O]

One thing to note: We struggled a lot to get things going for the 810 build cycle. Especially Zaerc did invest an awful lot of time to get things to build the way they are building at the moment. And thanks to his work, we will be able to get the next releases out of the door at a much faster pace.

[Murdock]

Good morning,

  Over the last 9 months since I initially found this site as an alternative to Windows MCE, I have dedicated a significant portion of my spare time (I've recently had my first child, finishing my MBA and working a 60+ hour per week job) in diving deep into the linux world, specifically around the technologies associated with MCE including Samba, MythTV, Apache, Z-wave, shell scripting and perl including some others aound Kerberos and a few other technologies. Granted with everything going on I haven't had a tremendous amount of time to dedicate to this, though I'm just about to finish up my MBA (Grad in August) and my baby girl is getting to be a bit more self sufficient. I'm planning on my time opening up within the next couple of months.

  With the studying and 'playing' i've done with the technologies listed I would consider myself moderately useful (though not quite approaching the level of knowledge the top tier here have like Thom, Hari, Zaerc, etc) and will be working on value adds to the project. After reading about 3 pages of the 12 on here, I agree with items from both sides. I had found difficulty in easily plugging myself in to anything that would be helpful, so I decided to get off my lazy ass to start studying so I could contribute at a level that would be helpful to everyone, I'm just sorry it's taken so long.

  I hope we'll be able to keep the project alive, and anything small in the near term I can do to help please let me know, otherwise I'll see you in the forums and on the irc channels.

Ryan

[tschak909]

Thank you, so much.

-Thom

[david_halliday]

Firstly, for documentation, I would strongly suggest looking a semi open wiki. A small linux distro SME Server http://wiki.contribs.org/ does a very good job of using a semi open wiki.

They manage this in a very smart way by having a defined Documentation team that reviews approves members to the docs group and constantly reviews (and improves wiki edits).

When a person is accepted into the docs group they are given guidelines on what to do, while any doc group member can edit anything (including the home page) nobody does they contribute where they are useful.

On a couple of occasions the site has suffered some defacement but by the very nature of wiki it was so simple to roll back it was only a problem for a couple of hours.

Secondly, For programming reference it should be possible to use doxygen docs++ or similar and embed the programmers reference directly in the code. It is a well know fact that programmers and hackers especially hate writing documentation but if it is right there in the code there is at least a chance it will get done.

Dave.

[tschak909]

david_halliday: doxygenated documents are coming soon, courtesy of niz23.

-Thom

[Marie.O]

Secondly, For programming reference it should be possible to use doxygen docs++ or similar and embed the programmers reference directly in the code. It is a well know fact that programmers and hackers especially hate writing documentation but if it is right there in the code there is at least a chance it will get done.

doxygen setup has been part of the source code for a long time. Just download the code, and run doxygen.

[niz23]

I will write a short wiki article how to do it. Hopefully today or tomorrow.
dDoxygen is simple to run but take some time and consume plenty of ram before it´s finished.
Output is about 1500-1600MB.

The doxygen conf files we have in svn need som small tweaks as they are no fully compatible with newer versions of doxygen.


/niz23

[david_halliday]

This is great news now if someone was responsible for placing the Doxygen docs on a developer section of the web, this would at least serve as some form of Developer documentation. The easier you make it for developers the more likely you will be able to attract quality helpers.

Dave.

[roberto99]

I just read here http://linuxmce.org/index.php/developer/documentation that one may also contribute by translating. I offered my help in the form of translating docs to german, which might attract german speaking users from Germany, Austria and Switzerland (and asked if the comunity thinks this could be of help to the project); I put my name in "the list" but had no reaction on this.

Now I wonder where I should put the translated docs and which ones are most inportant and should be done first. Then I would like to survey how many clicks we get on those docs to see if it really is worth it (is this survey possible?.

What do you think?
Roberto

[totallymaxed]

This is great news now if someone was responsible for placing the Doxygen docs on a developer section of the web, this would at least serve as some form of Developer documentation. The easier you make it for developers the more likely you will be able to attract quality helpers.

Dave.

Realistically you will need to checkout the code base from svn and then run doxygen against you local copy...then update your local copy regularly and re-run doxygen. There are no plans to host and update the doxygen output centrally currently.

All the best

Andrew

[valent]

I'd be careful before going too far down this thought line, valent!

I happen to know that some of the most prolific contributors here are the companies you speak of. If they were to "go it alone", I suspect we would suffer more than they ;-)

In my previous comments I was wrong, I had wrong ixea that there are atleast 5-6 companies selling LinuxMCE with Pluto licence, I knew that CHT was one company contributing to LinuxMCE. Now I see that only CHT is selling LinuxMCE systems.

I didn't express my idea clearly; for this project to go further I see that more companies should be started that sell and implement LinuxMCE devices and donate 10% of profit back to project. I hope to do this and others could do the same.