Re: [Phpwiki-talk] Ready for 1.3.8 ? Heads up

[Matthew P. <mp...@he...>]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 10:18:26PM -0600, electron wrote:
> An installer is useful because the whole point of our userbase is to be user
> friendly. This includes the admins. You shouldn't need a $40 an hour
> consultant to install phpwiki.

Tell everyone to use Debian.  <grin>

Practically, PHPWiki is pretty simple to install.  If someone's got an
Apache webserver with PHP4 working already, chances are they're about 90
seconds away from a working PHPWiki install.  Providing a "ready to go"
apache.conf for inclusion would be the one big step (I can provide the one I
use for Debian if anyone wants it).

> Defines suck. Defines are everywhere where they don't need to be. Index.php
> is hugely bloated, complex and not documented well.

Index.php shouldn't be a .php file.  PHP has a wonderful .ini parser, and
nobody uses it!  I'd recommend doing a switch (it might not be a 1.3 series
thing, though) to a .ini config file, out of the web tree entirely.  An
autowriter should be easy enough - load up index.php, iterate through the
define list, and write it all to an ini file.  Lack of internal
documentation on that will suck, though, but a default "edit-through" ini
file should work well.

> Finally, Documentation, Doc, and Doc!

I *think* that most of the stuff people are interested in is documented
inside the Wiki somewhere, but a lot of things just aren't easily
accessible.

> There is no rush to get to 1.4.0. 1.4.0 should be a complete, pretty, easy
> to install and easy to administer wiki miniCMS. 

Does SF have the ability to group "tasks" into releases, for planning
purposes?  If everything were tracked there, it would make it easier for the
externals like me to see how things are going.

> 1.3.8 Should proceed to 1.3.9 and implement a roadmap to 1.4.0.

Erm, no.  The 1.3 series should be bugfixes only.  Even my SQLite stuff
shouldn't really be released in a 1.3 series, unless it gets a *hell* of a
lot of testing (which it will, shortly).

We need to create a new 1.4 branch to make all these developmental changes
on.  Fork from the existing 1.3 tree and start hacking.  Make those big
changes like rewriting all the DB stuff.  Nothing in there should
necessarily be working particularly well, although keeping as much stuff
working as possible is good, because then the bold people can run it for
kicks.  But 1.3 is not the place to be working towards 1.4, because then we
either have no really new innovations in 1.4 (because we had to keep all the
old crud working), or nothing works for a while in 1.3 (because things are
being broken all the time and not everything is stable at the exact same
time) or we don't make any releases (because nothing's working properly).

But that opinion, of course, is as a rank outsider to PHPWiki, so it should
be taken with the sachet of salt provided.  <grin>

- Matt