[RT] My personal roadmap for gump

[Leo Simons <ls...@jicarilla.org>]

Hi gang,

I think it'd be nice to know what everyone's up to. I know some of the 
plans of some people and guess at the plans of others, but I'm sure many 
people are unaware of each others plans...anyway, here's my rather vague 
roadmap, and some context for that. This'll be a non-edited rant.

I've got three projects I'm working on at the moment:

  * Jicarilla (java)
  * Gump (python)
  * Moin wiki @ apache (python)

I know a lot about java, a little about python and a little about ruby 
(which, I have to say, is my fav. language atm by far). I plan to learn 
more about scripting languages, and how to build big projects using 
them. Lately, I've reallly been interested in "glue". Jicarilla is 
mainly glue between components (and a fledgling webserver), gump is 
mainly glue between projects, wikis are mainly glue between communities 
that may not neccessarily be project-oriented.

The glue between system-level tools, shell languages, scripting 
languages and generic languages (ie java) is quite different from the 
glue between projects and communities, and especially their overlap 
interests me (how gluing projects together seems to work well using a 
"gluey" piece of software, and how "gluey" pieces of software have 
rather unique communities).

I don't make money from software nor do I plan to. I do this thing as a 
hobby, for the fun of it. I like talking, thinking, writing, and am 
somewhat addicted to bugfixing (no idea why I like it. Really don't).

I plan to explore gump in order to learn python, and to improve on my 
software-user-interaction design abilities (since gump interacts rather 
badly with some users, there's lots of oppurtunity here). I am 
interested in how a glue project as gump can gradually evolve into a 
platform for glue.

I plan to pour a lot of my ideas about collaborative distributed 
software development into or on top of gump. I see gump as about the 
most interesting (OSS community-wise) piece of software that exists, 
there's this vibe around here that I want to surf on.

I really have /no/ time for /any/ of this. I spend a lot of time 
studying physics, and I should be spending more. And I have a "real 
life" of course. So I'm likely to have ideas, write e-mails (did I say I 
like talking?), then getting started on something, and abandoning it 
halfway through completion. I am always hoping that people pick up on an 
idea and run with it. When that happens, I'm usually enticed to actually 
finish some things. Not because I like finishing things, but because I 
like happy people :D

This positive vibe, which I think gump has a lot of and will have a lot 
more of, is something I enjoyed tremendously when I joined the ranks of 
the ASF, but have been missing sometimes lately. I hope to bathe in it 
here :D

A little more concretely, I'd like to think a lot more about gump 
workflow (the role of continuous integration in distributed open source 
development, and what that role should/could evolve to), talk about it a 
lot, and then prove the ideas that rolll out. I'm currently reading the 
8-year-old Apple Mac user interface guidelines :D

While doing that, I'd like to explore the rest of the workflow in OSS 
development whilst working on gump itself. For example, I think some of 
the parts of the ASF that I've seen are too "closed" and "isolated" and 
I'd like to explore with gump some of the ideas on how that can be done 
differently. An experiment in an experiment if you will.

Yada yada yada. Could go on for a while, but I won't. Let's hear about 
you! :-D

-- 
cheers,

- Leo Simons

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Re: [RT] My personal roadmap for gump

[Stefan Bodewig <bo...@apache.org>]

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004, Leo Simons <ls...@jicarilla.org> wrote:

> Yada yada yada. Could go on for a while, but I won't. Let's hear
> about you! :-D

Luckily Gump has enough visionaries to leave room for the pragmatics,
one of whom is me. ;-)

I know that I don't have infinite time to spend on Gump (or anything
else) and I really hate it when I start things and know I won't be
able to finish them.  So I try to focus on the places where I can be
most effective.

Right now I concentrate on getting as many things buildable as
possible.  By getting the metadata correct and the dependencies
straight I'm far more effective for Gump than by fiddling with Python.
It has been fun to go back and forth together with Niclas until we
finally had most of Avalon building.  I try to avoid the "wait 24
hours" part of Leo's other [RT] by offering my Gump setup for tests.

This means that I don't have time to get up-to-speed with Python to
help with actual Gumpy development.  I can comment and chime in into
the discussion and that's what I do.

Having said that, my primary goals for Gump - after being able to
build as much as possible - are support for different build systems
(Maven, NAnt, make, ...) and making Gump reach beyond Java.  The .NET
platform may be tricky given the instability of Mono for non-Intel
platforms (and in particular for non-Linux OSes on non-Intel
platforms), but in the end I'd like us to be able to offer Gump as a
service to the whole of the ASF.

Stefan

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Re: [RT] My personal roadmap for gump

[Stefano Mazzocchi <st...@apache.org>]

Leo Simons wrote:

> Yada yada yada. Could go on for a while, but I won't. Let's hear about 
> you! :-D

Thanks Leo, this is a wonderful idea.

Here is my personal roadmap.

I'm interested in data emergence: how you can make people create 
metadata without knowing and without feeling like they are paying a tax 
in doing so.

Gump, to me, represents a way to create extremely high quality metadata 
about project development that would be tremendously complex/expensive 
for machines to do as a byproduct of applying the right amount of social 
pressure.

I'm lucky enough to be paid to do what I would do anyway and I plan to 
get involved directly with gump in a really short period, as soon as the 
infrastructure of our project that I'm building start to become more solid.

I personally think that bottom-up data emergence is the only way for the 
semantic web to come into existance: the top-down ontological might work 
in ivory towers but will never work in real life.

What this means in concrete, well, I still don't know, but I have the 
gut feeling that the dynamics around Gump will be extremely beneficial 
for what we are trying to achieve in a more global scale.

As well as it will be extremely beneficial as a 
across-programming-language-borders community unification tool.

I think Gump has *tremendous* potentials.

I plan to explore and research them in full details.

-- 
Stefano.

Re: [RT] My personal roadmap for gump

[Adam Jack <aj...@TrySybase.com>]

> Yada yada yada. Could go on for a while, but I won't. Let's hear about
> you! :-D

I'm interesting in Gump's viewpoint on OSS projects, and their interactions,
and I want to work on how that viewpoint can be leveraged. I care about
presenting this simple metadata in as many ways as valuable, from different
perspectives. I thought I wanted mathematical perspectives alone, but I've
become convinced that visual representations would be even better.

I would like to see Gump scale to many more projects, to create some map of
core OSS (folks can use google to find/evaluate more obscure ones.) I don't
want to see the 'rich get richer', and have folks focus in on the main
projects, but I'll accept that risk because I think folks deserve insights
into projects. I don't want OSS to be a crap shoot, I want some objective
insights when I chose to depend/rely upon somebody else (and invest my
energy in learning their solution.)

For example, I hear that forrest uses cocoon uses avalon, but even as close
to Gump metadata as I am (and however I see dependency tables), I don't
really understand "how much", or "what aspects". If I hear something is
being de-emphasized,  I can't judge how this might ripple up to what I do. I
would love a visual graph of dependencies, perhaps with line thickness
annotating how strong a tie there is, etc. I want to be able to "see OSS
interactions" through views created by Gump.

So, for me it is all about views/insights/introspections/maps, hence I like
what folks can do with a cocoon/forrest webapp -- and graphs/charts/images.
Anything that allows us (perhaps dynamically on demand) to drill into this
information...

regards,

Adam


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