On 06-12-11 23:12, Josh Andler wrote:
New thread coming related to a possible IRC meeting. We definitely have people who want to contribute more, but who would prefer other eyes and or brains to help with figuring out solutions. If we could get some more experienced inkscape devs together with some of our newer and/or less experienced devs it could be a big win-win.
Excellent suggestion. Also, perhaps it's becoming time to have a face-to-face meeting with the explicit intention of mixing up old and new developers? (During a weekend or so of coding and discussing ideas?)
Issues like this also came up during the GSoC mentor summit (we're definitely not the only project with this kind of issue). Two of the ideas that came from that discussion are:
1. Make it easier to get started with coding. If you only contribute now and then it can take a while to make sure you have the latest check out and dependencies, and that the build system is up-to-date and working again. One idea that was presented is to create a small VM that contains everything you need to get started with coding, preferably including the latest source (perhaps even compiled and ready to go). I have looked into this and think that PuppyLinux might be a good starting point, but I haven't gotten around to customizing it yet. Another interesting project is Vagrant (vagrantup.com).
2. A developer-announce mailinglist. This should be a very low volume list that is used to keep people up-to-date on changes in the build system and so on. To be honest I'm not sure this is currently really needed for Inkscape, as the list is pretty low volume anyway, but it might make it easier for people who only pay casual attention to the list to pick up on important changes.
I also think it would be great if we could keep closer tabs on our unit and rendering tests. It is often relatively easy to fix failures (and especially regressions) in such tests, and it is quite important to do so. So if anyone has either the facilities to run these on a regular basis (or knows how to get them) or the time to set them up so that they are run regularly and the results presented in a sane fashion (so without the Ajax crap I put together), that would be great.