Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Who wants to built .WRK?

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Posted by Jade Rubick on
Eric, .WRK has yet to be built. I'm going to be working on it at some point in the next few months, but even the organization of it is pretty tentative at this point. Lars was leading up the project, but seems to be working on some other projects right now.

It will happen, but it needs some attention and developer time. I am using ACS 3.4 for our Intranet, with a heavily customized interface. We've been using it for about two years, and I've learned a lot in the process, and hope to use that to help in the .WRK effort.

However, I'd like .WRK to be a pretty flexible entity.

One of the major problems with the ACS 3.4 version of the Intranet package was that it was written so specifically for ArsDigita's needs.

One concern I've had is that if one of us goes off and writes this package, it may do the same thing all over again. That certainly is what my own tendency would be.

Another problem I'm going to face, that many of the rest of you won't, is that I have to migrate all of my old data from ACS 3.4.

We've heavily customized the ticket tracker, to where it is not for tracking bugs, for is a collaborative to-do list. I've thought about porting it to OpenACS/dotWRK. I'm not really happy with any of the ticket trackers right now. None of them are general enough to be used for all to-do items, and I kind of like the interface we've developed here. However, it is a fair amount of work.

The whole project is fairly large though, especially because it's difficult for those involved to sit down and plan out how it might work. Collaborative programming works, but it's easier if you have something concrete to start from. Or at least that's my (limited) experience.

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Posted by Jeroen van Dongen on
I'm in more or less the same situation as Erik (although I'm migrating away from a completely home-brew situation to oacs), and as such heavily interested in dotWrk.

Althoug I agree with Jade that it is most likely that things will speed up more and more with a growing code-base, I also think that the project needs what in the oacs community seems to be called a 'gatekeeper' - otherwise I see a risk that people start independent dotWrk-a-like things (I know I would), which distracts valuable mantime from dotWrk.

Is there already somebody (actively) assuming that role? If time is an issue - I can 'donate' time to the project, not a whole lot (say 8h/week) but on a fairly structural basis for the coming 3-4 months at least ('cause it has a strong relation with part of my daytime job).

IRL pulling large projects is a big chunk of what I do, so besides coding I can bring something to the table here in the area of planning/coordinating/pushing.

To summarize: I've time to offer to spend on dotWrk-a-like things. I can either spend it on a 'fork' or on 'the real thing'.

Rgds,
Jeroen

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Posted by Jeroen van Dongen on
From my previous post one may wonder whether or not I actually read the stuff around dotWrk - I did. And I saw the 'people' and 'todo' etc. However I didn't notice any real progress so far - so that's where my questions/remarks come from.

Correct me if I'm wrong.