Re: [Themis-dev] Themis re-organization

[Raymond C. R. <z3r...@bb...>]

Hi Kevin,
This is just a preliminary response, mainly to let you know that I'm
not just ignoring you. I'm cc'ing the mailing list so that others can
see my response as well. I want to apologize to you and the others for
the lack of response these last few months; part of the problem has been
a time issue (and the months did quickly slip by), part of the problem
has been a deluge of other emails and problems that I've needed to
address, and a good part has been just plain old laziness.

I would prefer  any general chit chat between multiple developers in a
meeting/conference form to take place on irc for several reasons: first,
it's a very simple and easily accessible protocol and system available
for free use across many operating systems and hardware platforms;
second, it allows active, moderated or unmoderated communication from
all interested parties; and third it is easily logged by all
participants. If there's another medium than can meet these criteria,
then I'm all for it.

I'll follow this up with a more detailed analysis of the portions of
Themis that I've personally written or worked on, but here's a quick
assessment from memory on the major components:

    *   The Framework Application
          In general pretty stable and offers a flexible platform for
loading and managing add-ons, and allowing "anonymous" interaction
between add-ons, meaning that the add-ons don't need to have any
specific intimate knowledge of one another to communicate and work with
each other. The add-on system needs to be expanded and adapted to handle
Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox add-ons but is pretty capable as is. The user
interface also needs to be tweaked, especially when it comes to the
application settings and the about box. The TCP communications could
also use a bit of debugging. While SSL support is currently working via
a non-OpenSSL toolkit, I've preferred OpenSSL overall for quite some
time. I don't believe that it (OpenSSL) compiles on BeOS or Haiku at
this time.

    *   The Cache System
          The cache system is extremely functional, though it could
stand a rewrite to be a bit more streamlined and for code
beautification. There is a possible flaw in that it creates an index on
all drives BFS for the cache file types, which allows Themis to query
for a cache file for any given URL regardless of which drive you might
have booted from. Some people might see that as a flaw, some might see
it as a feature. Personally I fall into the latter category, but
everyone has his or her own tastes.

    *   The HTTP Protocol and Cookies
          Cookies are working per the original RFC, and overall are very
stable. While they can be easily edited on disk, it would be a good idea
to add an in-application cookie editor and viewing utility. The HTTP
protocol support needs to be rewritten, and I would kill for BeOS/Haiku
to have PCRE built in to make processing HTTP headers easier, but
overall HTTP support is pretty stable and is mostly 1.1 compatible. It
is currently missing POST/PUT support (though that should be fairly
simple to add), and digest authentication, but it does feature basic
authentication.

    *   The Image Handler
          I was rewriting that last year in August, but lost all the
changes I made before I could commit them. The old one basically just
told the renderer add-on that any image it wanted was available, even if
it wasn't. It was just a stub more or less
because of some crashing issues I hadn't resolved years ago.

      *   The Makefile
          While it works, it is extremely ugly. I would love to move to
Jam if I could figure out how to use it. But I don't have even a weak
grip on how that system works.

    *   Javascript
        The SpiderMonkey javascript library was compiled and added to
the repository long ago, and is in desperate need of updating and better
understanding. While I got it to run the demo code that the Mozilla
project posted at the time, I never really figured out how to get it to
run a real Javascript script, much less really integrated into the rest
of the project.

I'll try to be a bit more complete at a later time (probably this week).

Raymond
ar...@co... wrote:
> Hey again,
>
> I have talked a little bit with Mark about Themis....
>
> I want to offer a suggestion and see if you might be interested.
>
> I would like to begin bringing in new developers to help out with Themis, however, I can't currently do that for several reasons:
>
> 1) I don't know what aspects of Themis are in good shape and which need to be re-done.
> 2) I don't now what parts are already called for (which ones you and Mark want to personally work on which ones are ok for other to come in an help with)
> 3) There is not much activity so that newcomers can ask questions when they come in.
>
>
> So...
> I wonder if you might consider setting up some kind of meeting in the near future to help get things ready for new developers to come in?
>
> I have attached a sample of what I kind of had in mind... though it doesn't have to be done that way at all if you don't want.
>
>
> If you think this would be a good route, then do you know of any way a discussion could be had that wouldn't involve IRC?  I suspect you probably want to use IRC... but was just wondering if any of the others could be used.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Kevin
>