I think that Robert's idea, and Boris' amplification, are excellent. I've started working a little on this, from the other side of things, namely, the mythical 'new user'. I've spent some time writing descriptions of how the interaction between user ("I've got a problem that's bugging me"; or "I found a bug!") and project ("Drupal.org/the community") works. The idea is to create easy entry, and easy navigation, kind of like the great signage at Schiphol airport ("Make it hard to get lost") This would help in promoting the proposed "install profile/recipe" because it would present the story in two parts: 1. Here are the processes, protocols and mechanisms that the Drupal community uses to work together 2. Here is the technology recipe required to support 1.) I think that this approach is useful because - it's difficult to understand the machine if you don't know what it's used for; - some of our own community (I myself included) really don't know what's going on with respect to 1) - clarifying this would help make the process clearer, easier to use, modify if necessary, and tune. One way to improve Drupal.org performance is to save needless clicks. I know that there have been great efforts made to simplify issue tracking for users already - my main effort to this point has been trying to document the issue reporting/tracking process. Eventually I'd like to see this lead to fewer bad issue reports. Suggestions are welcome :) Djun On 5-Jan-2006, at 3:47 AM, Boris Mann wrote:
On 5-Jan-06, at 12:38 AM, Robert Douglass wrote:
Dries Buytaert wrote:
Chances are that the cvs.module's import code suffers from some bit rot so if someone wants to prepare or test the cvs.module's import code, that would be much appreciated.
It would be helpful if there were some really good documentation on how to use Drupal to run a site like Drupal.org. I'd have to work pretty hard to set up the project module and cvs.module with my current skills, and not knowing exactly how Drupal.org runs and operates is another hurdle.
Drupal is a vastly successful project. Part of the reason why it is successful is the infrastructure that has been created to support development and participation. It seems to me like this infrastructure would probably work well for a number of other projects as well, yet I've never heard of or seen anyone running a setup like Drupal.org.
Maybe we'd get more people involved in the tools like project and cvs modules if we made it easier to set up other projects and sites with Drupal.org infrastructure. This would take a bit of documentation and marketing.
I have never gotten a currently tagged version of project module to run with a current version of Drupal out of the box. Even using a CVS version meant lots of (nasty) bugs...I suspect this is because Drupal.org (along with project.module) always runs close to head and project.module maintainers hadn't been diligent about tagging/ branching. With all the recent work by nedjo, it's shaping up nicely -- thanks (and to the man behind the curtain, Kieran, for sponsoring that).
An "open source community" install profile/recipe *would* be great.
-- Boris Mann Vancouver 778-896-2747 San Francisco 415-367-3595 SKYPE borismann http://www.bryght.com