alexandria

[Jesse McConnell <je...@gallup.com>]

hi all,

I have been on this list for a while now, and followed many of the
threads of conversation.  Several months ago, right about when I started
working with Gallup I sent out some comments on this list about what I
thought Alexandria was and tried to gauge interest and whatnot.

I ended up installing the mozilla tool chain (all perl) and have it all
working.  But there is always that drive to do something different and
better...:)

Would others on this list be interested in having a bit of a
discourse on the Alexandria project as a whole and perhaps hammer out
some sort of vision on what it could be?  The documentation is aging
quite well and there are plenty of other projects that are doing bits
and pieces of what Alexandria kinda wants to do.

I gather from the lists that development on Alexandria as a overall
project is rather dead.  Perhaps I am wrong about the overall project
, but anyway it looks like some of the sub-projects are chugging along well.  Perhaps that is because they have a fairly well defined mission.

Anyway, there are so many different tools and technologies out there
that could be leveraged for this that I thought people might be
interested in having a discussion on where alexandria could go.  Perhaps
leverage off of things like http://www.opensymphony.com for building the
core application.  I have always felt this system (alexandria) needed to
be a central system that ties lots of pieces together.  I would love a
system that acted as a portal to tools like those on the mozilla tool
chain.  Perhaps an administrative aid for CVS, or not...but certainly
ties to an issue tracking system, automated build system, Source
browsing, crossreferencing source, project metrics gathering and
reporting, javadoc and that ilk.

To me the goal of alexandria is very vague.  I think it wants to be a
portal into certain tools and tie all of that information together, but
to what end?  What is the purpose behind working on something like
Alexandria if I already have 5 different systems in place that would all
have to be replaces or altered to work with this new system.  What is
the itch that writing this software will scratch?  Personally, I put in
postnuke as a content mænagement/weblog system that holds links to each
of the tools we have running.  tinderbox (mozilla), bonsai (mozilla), bugzilla(mozilla), twiki(twiki.org), lxr (mozilla) are all handy on an individual scale...and it helps that the mozilla tools all kinda know about each other and link across...  End result is a site that pretty much does what Ålexandria wants to....with a fairly small amount of effort.

It would be neat to have everything being implemented by one
system...but I don't know if it is worth it.

So, I guess I would like to ask people here what they think about the
overall goal of Alexandria (not the sub-projects, Gump have enough
vision and goal).  

Thoughts?
Jesse

-- 
Jesse McConnell				<je...@gallup.com>
The Gallup Organization			(402) 486-6987

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