Re: [Config4gnu-developer] Meeting to discuss short-term goals

[<p.c...@ar...>]

> Jason and I have decided to hold a meeting to discuss our goals for the next
> couple of months.  I think we're at a pretty important point where we need
> to get certain things moving or we'll miss out on some great opportunities.

That is really great. I would like to just add some thought here.

> 3) exactly what roles we want to try to encourage other people to help out
> with (i.e., communicating w/ other projects, website upkeep, testing w/
> various config files, development, etc.)

I guess mostly someone needs to feel an itch in the first place. The good thing with using a wiki is that if someone asks a question on the list and you or anybody else can answer quickly the person can at the same time be kindly asked to document it in the wiki if it was of help for him. Likely they will do it, it is not hard at all. This way answering emails can improve documentation directly and be itself encouraged more, too.

To get an idea see the FAQ that is available and editable at http://linuxwiki.org/Config4Gnu/EnglishFAQ for now. Same could be done with HOWTOs etc.

(To be able to easily convert "plain" wiki content to html, docbook, tex etc. ReStucturedText wikis i.e. http://www.zwiki.org or conversion tools might be interesting.)

> 5) features we NEED to have vs features we WANT to have.  We need to get CFG
> completely usable asap, fancy features we personally would like to see
> should wait until thats accomplished, as painful as that may be.

Good, that is what i personaly feel is the most pressing. Release of 0.4.0 (to follow the popular scheme ;-) or higher if you feel like it for people to use,  test and write meta-defs and thereby asking questions and giving experience. A little more how-to might be necessary for a start though (->wiki again).

> 
> 6) what projects to try to get support/collaboration with

I looked at the autopackage projected mentioned here earlier for a distribution neutral package format. Is cfg meta-data already able to be used in such a way? Distribution specific things like /etc/sysconfig/network or whatever will still have to include their meta-data in their own distributions package (deb, rpm, etc.).

However for basic distribution specific things like the network config do you see a way to harmonize at least the way they are configured within cfg? Say, to have the same nodes and properties in the xml representation. All the different distros have mostly the same options i.e. IP, Network, Mask, or auto (DHCP) etc. anyway.

cheers,
-Peter