[dev] [commits] Horde branch master updated. 0d3a559c058aa995b7764d85b80df42f50324938

[Michael J.Rubinsky]

Quoting Ben Klang <ben at alkaloid.net>:

> On Oct 6, 2010, at 11:11 PM, Chuck Hagenbuch wrote:
>
>> Quoting Eric Jon Rostetter <eric.rostetter at physics.utexas.edu>:
>>
>>> Quoting Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>:
>>>
>>>>> Yeah, but it is oh so useful...  Could we keep it as an "unofficial"
>>>>> application or something?
>>>>
>>>> Sure - could be a separate github repo?
>>>
>>> Would it still be "unofficially supported" on the horde mailing lists
>>> and horde web site?
>>>
>>> Or would you want to basically just split it off completely and not
>>> have it mentioned on the website at all?
>>>
>>> Maybe an "unofficial" or "contributed" section of the web site modules
>>> pages?
>>>
>>> Just not sure where you want to go with this exactly...
>>
>> We talked about a few options at the hackathon on this, and didn't  
>> really get anywhere specific - we all agreed that an ecosystem of  
>> horde apps was something to strive for, but not sure how to get  
>> there.
>>
>> I won't veto (or delete it again!) if someone re-adds it, but I  
>> still feel like we should be focusing our apps more, and that jeta  
>> is way outside our sweet spot.
>>
>> -chuck
>>
> For what it's worth, I concur with Chuck here.  I think the easiest  
> thing to do in the short term is to mark what the official Horde  
> apps are.  Today I think that means everything that comes with  
> Groupware plus probably tickets, wiki, files, photos and  
> timetracker.  Fair candidates might also be SCM browser, news and  
> bookmarks.

I'd vote more strongly for moving News/Jonah to the official list. I'd  
also like bookmarks moved as well, but honestly requires some  
considerable refactoring before it could be released so I'm ok with it  
being left in the "maybe" list.

> That still leaves several apps that are very good but either not  
> feature-complete or buggy/semi-maintained.  In this category are DNS  
> and email managers, CDR viewer, social network, etc.  Personally I  
> rely on several of these apps daily but their existence at the same  
> level as our flagship applications I think betrays user expectations  
> of maturity.
>
> This obviously will require further discussion and actual effort,  
> but finding some way to have a directory of Horde apps (like what  
> Firefox does for extensions) would be a good thing for the rest of  
> the project in my opinion.

To recap my recollection of our discussions, since I don't see these  
documented anywhere else yet:

We were talking about something like a contrib channel on  
pear.horde.org, at least for the downloading/installing of these types  
of applications. As for where the *existing* applications source  
should be moved to, we considered both having a single repo for each  
application as well as keeping them where they are. The argument for  
keeping them where they are is that anyone who would be coding the  
apps would obviously also need the rest of the framework as well, the  
disadvantage is that it would potentially add to existing developers  
workload, and could be seen as "polluting" our repository with  
non-mature apps. Other options we considered were a single separate  
repository for these apps (rejected this idea based on the lessons we  
learned from keeping hatchery maintained) and leveraging github  
repositories.


Personally, not sure what the answer is, but I'm leaning towards  
keeping the existing non-core apps in the repo but advertise them  
differently. Any new apps that would fall into this category should  
probably be placed on github, be somehow packaged for delivering via  
our experimental/contrib pear channel if it's deemed complete enough,  
and be the sole responsibility of the original contributor to maintain.

--mike

The Horde Project
http://www.horde.org