[Icecrawler-devel] ICECrawler and the near future

[Guillaume C. <las...@gm...>]

Hi everyone !

I hope the holidays are going fine for all of you !

Well... There are several things I'd like to talk about. Namely :
- Staff
- What misses to make ICECrawler work
- Communication
- Our brand new admin
- Documentation for the project
- The IC05 report


=== Staff ===

Sooooo... Let's begin with the beginning : you ! Us ! The team ! ICECrawler
devels !
To be able to work efficiently, I'd like to know when you guys will want to
spend some time on the project this summer. No need to be really precise,
but having a rough idea would be cool... For my part I should become active
in the end of the week / start of the next week.

=== What misses to make ICECrawler work ===

(As a tiny reminder)

As you already know it, though almost all modules should work independently,
ICECrawler a a whole doesn't work in its current state. The main issues now
are :
- The network module make requests but don't store its contents (which is a
bug, not some sort of unimplemented thingy)
- The GUI is a stub. We got ideas, most of us (at least I think) find these
ideas cool but nevertheless, nothing in the UI is connected with the rest of
the app, and there are still choices to make concerning the layout of our
"crawl status" and "crawl settings" tabs

When these issues will be addressed, I think we'll have a fair amount of
testing to do too...


=== Communication ===

Within our last semester we had the opportunity to meet once a week, which
probably won't be the case for a while now. So to work together we'll have
to adopt some means of communication. Looking at our ready-to-use tools, we
have : the icecrawler mailing-lists, #icecrawler IRC channel, the ICECrawler
wiki, Instant messaging using MSN / GTalk / Something else. I think the
mailing-lists and IRC are the most effective way we have to talk about
ICECrawler, but with one backside. Even if we are a team of full native
French speakers now, this won't necessarily be the case in the future (be it
near or distant). Beside that, the mailing-lists are also some kind of PR
(Public Relations) thing. Since they are public, (excepted
icecrawler-internal, to which almost no-one is subscribed now) they also act
as some kind of advertising for our project. Someone interested in what we
do (from a developer point of view) is likely to browse the mailing-list
archives to take the temperature and see what is going on. And for that
reasons, I'd really like to keep our mailing-lists English-speaking ones.
That particular thing could be a drawback for some of us maybe... So I
insist for you to tell me if it is the case for you, since the mailing-lists
haven't been used by anyone excepted me so far. I also want to insist on the
fact these lists are not only for me to post information. It should be
something for everyone to use (even external people after all, since
everyone can subscribe) to simply discuss about the project, ask questions,
tell us what you're doing, and so on. Therefore please don't hesitate to
post on it.

Here are our set-up lists :
- icecrawler-devel, the main development mailing list, which should be used
almost every time we want to discuss something about the project
- icecrawler-internal, a private mailing-list for which archives are not
accessible to the public, which should be used to talk about confidential
issues when there will be some (like security issues / things like that)
- icecrawler-announce, which will be used when we will be more mainstream to
announce new versions, things like that
- icecrawler-commits, a brand new one, to which a message is sent by
sf.netsvn server whenever a commit occurs, allowing us to keep tracks
of them.

Oh, and since it is communication-related too, the developer section from
the wiki is now readable by anyone (it's still only editable by us though)

One other thing, starting now, i'll be on our IRC channel whenever I'm
online so you can find me there if you want to.

=== Our brand new admin ===

I'd like to introduce you to phantez :-) , who is now an admin for the
project at SF.net and the wiki. So if something goes wrong or if some
maintenance is needed for any reason, we are at least two people to be able
to provide the service. It should help us to avoid problems if one of us
would be unavailable at some time.


=== Documentation for the project ===

One thing that must be completed at least when ICECrawler will be up and
working, would be to fully document our source code using Doxygen or
something else is someone has a better alternative to tell us about. For my
part I still have the UML diagrams made with Visual Paradigm without having
them finished nor published. I will make sure this is corrected more or less
quickly


=== The IC05 report ===

We may be having a problem here... I assume you all received my e-mail with
the report attached for Franck to reviewed, I asked him to reply when he'd
have received, but he haven't yet. I wrote him again today. I don't know if
he has answered to someone else or something, so please tell me if you know
something I don't about this...


I think that's all. I'm so sorry I couldn't make this e-mail shorter. Still,
have a nice day !

Guillaume