Re: Lampadas development plans

[Eric Baudais <baudais kkpsi org>]

On Mon, 2002-07-15 at 09:49, David Merrill wrote:
> I want to run some of my plans past you to see if you can live with
> them...
> 
> Reading information about files from CVS I can handle in the first
> release. I can show logs, history, commits, anything that can be
> pulled from cvs. That's all very easy to do.

That is essentially what we want.  We would like Lampadas to be smart
with CVS and automatically update the last date the documentation in CVS
was changed.  This data would be put directly into the database.

> Eventually Lampadas will allow you to edit documents through the web,
> almost like a Wiki but without the promiscuous editing of a Wiki,
> although that will also be possible depending how you set your
> permissions. It will include the WikiText format, so editing is as
> easy as in a Wiki, but you can embed any DocBook tags right into the
> text. So, writing DocBook becomes enormously simpler and easier.

This isn't as important to the GNOME project as a good document
management system.

> Then, you will be able to commit your changes into the CVS tree, again
> right through the web. This will also depend on how you configure
> permissions. The alternative is to have an admin review changes before
> committing them to the CVS tree.

The changes need to pass through xmllint first to check the validity of
the document before committing to CVS.

> However, all of this is going to be a challenge. I don't doubt that it
> can be done, but I am not going to hold off on doing a 1.0 release to
> wait for it. Even without being able to *write* to CVS, it will be a
> powerful meta-data management system, much more powerful than the
> DocTable and the LDPDB are. I suspect this is the most important thing
> Gnome is looking for, right?

Yes.

> So, the plan is to work out with you and the LDP what features are not
> yet included, and have them coded by the end of the month, so we can
> freeze code and prepare for a 1.0 about a month later. I believe I
> have all functionality the LDP requires already in place, so I'll be
> putting my attention towards Gnome now.

There is one more major feature we want in Lampadas.  The feature is a
query tool.  This tool should be able to search on the author,
maintainer, contributor, date updated, status, writing, accuracy, if a
maintainer is needed, type, and string.  The other feature is 

> This week I'll add the Gnome category system and Gnome apps list. When
> it is ready for you to review, I'll let you know. Until then, you can
> follow the progress on http://demo.lampadas.org as always.

Thanks for your work on Lampadas.  I think it will be a nice system once
it is released.

Eric Baudais