[Mod-pubsub-developer] Notes from 12/2002 MPSUG

[Joyce P. <tru...@ya...>]

Since we're all sharing, here are the notes from the first MPSUG
meeting in December.



Meeting of the mod_pubsub user's group
December 11, 2002

Attending:
0.  Scott LePera
1.  Joyce Park
2.  Adam Rifkin
3.  Ben Sittler


1.  Joyce announced that immediately before the meeting, she had
packaged and released version 0.3 with all contributed code to date. 
She also reiterated that Ben also has permission to package and
release code.  Ben suggested that he might take over some of the
release tasks of the group.

2.  Adam enumerated his efforts to stir up support among influential
developers.  The most important single event was Rohit Khare's
announcement of mod_pubsub at the Supernova conference, which led to
mentions on ScriptingNews.com and other high-traffic weblogs.  Adam
has also written to numerous influential Web developers, many of them
former employees of KnowNow, Inc., with invitations to try the
product and perhaps join the developer community.  Response has been
gratifyingly positive given the generally poor relationship between
KnowNow, Inc. and said developers -- with perhaps a whiff of feeling
that mod_pubsub was "old news".  Mike Dierken (AsynchMessaging) has
contributed actual code to the project.

3.  Scott, as Head Webdev, was asked to add a link to the Sourceforge
project page from the homepage.  This necessitates him becoming more
comfortable with the Sourceforge file release system, which is
idiosyncratic.

4.  Joyce, as fit punishment for her constant bitching about the
slowness and ugliness of the Perl module, has been tasked with
porting to PHP.  Alternatively or in the meantime, Ben has been
tasked with looking into porting via Swig.  The PHP community has
been totally ignored by KnowNow, Inc. to date, a significant omission
given the size of the community and its affinity for our product.

We also discussed our technical goal, of producing a full Apache
module written in C, and why the easiest way to get there might be
via a PHP port.  PHP already has excellent HTTP handling
functionality built in C, as opposed to the clutch of Perl libraries
used by the Perl module.

5.  Ben was tasked with checking in libkn, the so-called "C
microserver", which Adam informed us will be contributed by KnowNow,
Inc.

6.  Joyce suggested that development of applications be forked to
reflect the philosophical disagreement between mod_pubsub developers
who wish to support all browsers and those who wish to take advantage
of the features of recent browsers.  All agreed that this should be
done, with Ben's proviso that if he could find a way to make non-NS4
apps compliant with NS4, he would do so on the NS4 branch.

7.  Many expressions of wonder and thanksgiving were directed at the
current management of KnowNow, Inc. for their magnanimity in
releasing mod_pubsub's codebase.

All attendees mentioned that work would likely slow down due to
upcoming holidays and vacations, and Joyce and Ben's lack of
connectivity for several weeks.

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