[gnome-summary] Gnome Summary Future Plans

[Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

Hello Folks!

So, I am going to attempt to write my vision on what I would like to see 
with regards to changes in Gnome Summary.  I'm going to break it into near 
term and long term.  You can figure out which ones you want to work on.  
My preference of course is that I have at least have someone work on the 
near term goals.

Near Term Goals

My near terms goals primarily revolve around translations and being able 
to have Gnome Summary be translated in as many languages as possible.  
This infrastructure is needed in order to not only accept english 
submissions of content but any content.  So a person from Thailand should 
be able to write to us in his native language and in our next summary it's 
all translated.  But currently, thats difficult to do.

* Fix the translation problem

  This problem requires that we have a sane way to be able to extract the 
  text of the summaries and then translate them.  We have a tool called 
  xml2po that can sort of do it, but it needs love.  

  Shaun McCance is currently going to try to fix this but thats only part
  of the problem.  We need to figure out where the translations go, and
  what the procedure to translate the summaries in the current framework.
  
  There is also a configuration in Apache that reads the LANG variable and
  loads the right language when it becomes available.  (if it's not 
  available, then it should say something to that effect)

  Gnome Summary will need a page thats similar to the Debian and GNU 
  web pages that show the current Summary and a list of languages on top
  that one could select.  (eg if Turkish language summary doesn't exist 
  they can read it in english)  So I hope we can get a nice clean design
  that integrates with the w.g.o or d.g.o. properly.

  Someone from the GNOME Web team is going to try to see if we can move
  our current area to somewhere else.  So someone will have to figure out
  how our current scheme works and then figure out how to make it 
  compatible.

* Submissions

  We'd like a page for people to submit news
  article/suggestions/complaints/flames.  We need this because the 
  gnome-summary gnome org is a mailing list and it takes time to approve
  the posting.  Also it could be put in a manner where it could easily
  be integrated in the current GNOME Summary without a lot work.

* RSS feed

  I'd like to see an RSS feed of GNOME Summary, one for each language
  if possible.


Couple of Notes:
I currently like how we have our summaries.  It's very simple and easy to 
understand.  I was able to pick up how to do the summary from Uraeus in an 
evening.  Thats great, because it makes finding new volunteers easy.  We 
need to make sure that maintainability, and simplicity is foremost when we 
do all this.  Otherwise, when we're all gone the next generation will be 
sitting here trying to re-write the whole thing or be totally confused.  I 
don't want to see that. So nice docs is a good thing to do also.

So thats just the near term. :-)  Easy right? 

I'll write the long term goal tommorow.  Got hacking to do. :-)

In the meantime, here are some interesting places to go:

Check out the cvs repository web-devel-2.  It contains our gnome summary 
stuff.  It's also the entire d.g.o page.  It's not too big.  If you're 
bandwidth constraint, you can probably get part of the tree I'm guessing.

The gnome summary areas are:
content/news/summary
scripts/gnome-summary-xml

The DTD for the summary is in scripts/gnome-summary-xml
The xml files are in content/news/summary
There is a howto in content/news/summary/*howto*

If you read through that you'll know what hell we go through every 
Saturday. :-)

We generally have a schedule where we try to finish the summary by 
saturday afternoon or evening. 

Thats all for now.  I think there's something for everybody.  If you 
really want to do something complex we'll be handling that in the future 
stuff.  Thats where I'm really going to need some help! :-)

Thanks,
sri