The Pitch
Oliners (who don't know Java/Scala/OSS)
Etherpad. You know it, you love it, you miss it. Why don't you come work on it? Thats right, EtherPad is now Open Source software, and it needs some work.
October 8-10th we're hosting a Fedora Activity Day centered around EtherPad. We'll be working on packaging of the software. That covers technologies like J2EE, Scala, server-side-javascript, javascript, release engineering, and more. If any of those sound exciting, we'd like you to learn about it! We invite you to our hacking and to a few "intro sessions" throughout the weekend:
- Friday, October 8th @8pm - Intro to OSS development for Olin Students
- Saturday, October 9th @5pm - Q&A on how EtherPad works; technologies it uses
Java / Scala / JS / Release Engineers
Etherpad is the pinnacle of online, collaborative text editing. If you're not familiar with EtherPad, take a look at this video. Buuut the EtherPad code-base isn't exactly in a packageable state, as demonstrated by SDZ, here. We would like to package EtherPad and package it correctly.
October 8-9th(plus sleepless, greet the 10th nigh session), join us as we dissect EtherPad and mold it into a happy, best-practices following package. We'll get our hands dirty with Scala, build systems, server-side-javascript, and a whole host of other fun technologies. We'll hack along-side European EtherPad contributors, enjoy a delicious Indian brunch, and learn/teach fascinating stuff.
Date
computercolin: Some conflicts:
- Weekend of 15th is family weekend
- Weekend of 22th is admissions open-house
- Weekend of 22th also Ontario Linux Fest
- 25th is my birthday and I intend to be... busy ;)
computercolin: If we want pre-Ontario, gotta be weekend of Oct 1st or Oct 8th
The Task
Notes from Victor Vasilyev
I've successfully compiled and launched the project on the Fedora 13, and can confirm that is working well. But, I've also noticed that the Google wave has a bit more facilities :-(
After a brief researching of the project I've opinion that you'll have a lot of the tasks that should be completed before release of the project for the Fedora Linux distribution will happen. I see at least the following tasks:
- Decomposing of the project, and selecting of all "internal" and "external" components.
- Replacing the all third-party components with the requirements for each component to have a list of all external dependencies.
- Providing of the RPM packages for required third-party components that are not in Fedora yet (if any).
- Dividing of all external dependencies into build-time and run-time dependencies.
- Sorting of all "internal" components by their languages, and avoiding unneeded languages to simplify the project.
etc.
I think, you should also decide to use a build system that is "usual" for Java (e.g. Ant, Maven, etc.) instead of Bash-scripts.
...And, finally, will be better to see a components diagram for the project (e.g. UML components diagram) that might explain a role of each component, and their dependencies.