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?)

I think this should be discussed during the irc meeting. I keep trying to push for a f2f meeting/mini-hackfest and the board has previously stated support for sponsoring such an event. I think it's tough trying to coordinate though. If anything, I think we should plan in advance to give everyone the ability to plan for it and it wouldn't hurt to tie it to a relevant conference such as LGM or SVG Open if there's interest.

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).

Very interesting idea. I think it would be interesting to explore, but I would just want to make sure all dependencies are met for "all-feature" builds.

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've entertained the idea in the past, primarily for around release time with people getting notification of when commits are to be restricted. However, as you mention with the volume of the current list, this is why I haven't felt the need to pursue it.

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.

Agreed. In addition, I think we need to semi-regularly ensure that make check passes to relieve burden on Ted at release time.

Cheers,
Josh