Zikula Meeting Recap 2009-08-12

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 01:50:14AM -0400, Mel Chua wrote:
> >> 9) Do we have a formal requirements for each of the groups?  If yes,
> >> where are they documented?
> 
> FWIW, the current specs for Fedora Insight (from Marketing) are always 
> up at 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Insight#Platform_specs.2Frequirements.
> 
> Note that these specs haven't been prioritized/triaged yet, so it's 
> possible we might be able to work with a super-minimalist zikula that 
> could do just these three things:
> 
> * post articles to a permanent human-readable URL (like 
> http://whatever-domain-name.org/yyyy/mm/dd/title-of-article, or any 
> other standard schema Infrastructure might like)
> * tag articles
> * spit out feeds of articles (preferably one feed per tag + one feed 
> with everything)
> 
> (and a 4th one, "look pretty." But I'm assuming that it's skinnable no 
> matter what.)
> 
> I'm not very familiar with what zikula can do and so I'm a bit hazy on 
> following the discussion on why it's a no-(definite)-go for F12, but if 
> some group actively using a minimalistic zikula setup during F12 would 
> be useful as a stepping-stone to getting the full list of requirements 
> for docs.fp.o (and other instances) going for F13, we're happy to serve 
> as guinea pigs. Might this be an option, or are the blockers things that 
> won't go away if we scale down to getting up a much much simpler instance?

Great questions Mel.

As for the first point, -- why it's no-go for F12: Two months into the
start of the project, we're still minus several things we must have,
including licensing fixes for packages, and a small core group of
people with the technical skills needed to do the integration and
workflow development.  We think the latter part will get better after
summer ends, but that leaves us in a pinch as far as timing against
our release.  The former we can probably accomplish before F12 with
some influx of help that we expect over the next few weeks.

However, the *test* instance can continue to move forward and even to
rock by F12, so that we could plan for a deployment during the "lull"
(I use the term *very* loosely) after F12 GA, when there's not so much
release-specific activity going on involving the people who are
working on the Zikula team.  Unfortunately, the instance can only get
so simple -- we need a certain amount of functionality to lift off,
and without that it gets difficult to fulfill anyone's needs.  The
modules all exist, mind you; in some cases it's just a matter of
resolving some niggling license problems, and getting upstream
agreement to the changes so that we're not carrying these patches
forevermore.

I think you offer of guinea pigs is on-point and we will definitely
take you up on it at the appropriate time.  And of course, you and
anyone else is welcome to pitch in to any extent desired to help, as
always!

There is a general page on the wiki at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Zikula.  There's a link on that page
that will help get a sandbox set up on F11, if you know someone who's
interested in looking at the core system.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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