[Hamara-devel] number of suggestions

[Vikas Tara]

> Hi all,
> Just went through the month's mail. Number of things need to be pointed out :-
>
> The Wiki -
>
> a. While moinmoin has been used for now, I think that was a mistake
> and will share the reasons for it :-
>
> 1. The comparison between moinmoin 1.8 and Mediawiki is wrong on
> number of counts. As Mediawiki stands today, all the issues that have
> been pointed out in moinmoin 1.8 are and have been handled in
> mediawiki.
>
> The most interesting which mediawiki has bought and wikipedia used a
> lot is the talk page which is non-existent in moinmoin.
>
> Allow me to share an e.g. :-
>
> See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian and more interestingly
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Debian
>
> That is how a wiki works and should work where people can throw
> queries back and forth.
>
> While Hamara is just getting its feet up there would be disconnect
> with users till 'target users' are not identified.
>
> For e.g. see http://wiki.hamaralinux.org/How%20do%20I%20calibrate%20my%20printer%3F
>
> now if a newbie user were to per-use that article he would not know
> how to make head or tail of it. And because there is no talk page s/he
> would either try on the forum, or on the mailing list or IRC to figure
> it out and the chances of the wiki article improving will be less . If
> there was a talk page then that would be asked there and some
> suggestions made on the article on the talk page itself.
>
> You can also see the concept of badges which wikipedia was the
> innovator of (which now mozilla thinks it made.)
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Barnstars
>
> Now of course wikipedia is also getting into the badges bit
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BADGE
>
> To add to it you can also do funky things like this :-
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shirishag75
>
> Moinmoin doesn't have all these possibilities or at least haven't seen
> any wikis of moinmoin which had these fun things. Whether or not
> hamara wants to have fun things like these could be another question
> so would let that be something you can look into.
I think you make a very good case for use switching to mediawiki

gets a +1 from me - and it's still early enough to do it.


> BUGS -
>
> b. Bugzilla has the most impossibiliest interfaces to work with. It is
> fine if you are going to have only a few bugs there, but it is
> impossible to navigate if you have any more than 100 odd packages.
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ is a prime example of why it doesn't
> scale well.
Bugzilla has a pretty large userbase though and is used on major 
projects. Redhat host their entire app range using it.

I am not sure the interface is enough of a reason for a move - perhaps 
we can improve it?

I don't have a particular preference though - so perhaps put it to vote?
>
> " We will not do what Canonical is doing with Ubuntu, taking
> everything from the community and returning back very little." - Raju
>
> I think the best way would to say that all the code generated will be
> GPLv2 or GPLv3 (depending on what the team is/would be ok with.) and
> all the code will be available to per-useable on git.
Agree - although some devs might prefer more liberal licences in some cases
>
> Rolling release or fixed release -
>
> This is actually more of a non-issue. Neither of those matter because
> you are assuming that people have good bandwidth which is not the
> case. The underlying problem that needs to be tackled is updates and
> that is severely broken. One way is what Debian does with point
> releases, every couple of months or so they do point releases, for
> e.g. Debian wheezy has had 8 point releases where only bug-fixes are
> put up. But this means that you need two sets of people, one who would
> be doing only the bug-fixes part while the other set of people do
> development. This is what Ubuntu tried and failed.
Continuing on from our chat on IRC - the debain way seems like a good one.

I like the idea of having a stable production desktop - and for us to be 
able to keep pushing bug fixes to it so that it becomes even more stable.

Ubuntu did frustrate me quite often - because apt-get dist-upgrade often 
mean't one step forward and two steps back.
>
> Looking forward to what people think of the above.
Yep - would love to hear other devs views on the above

-- 
Founder - Hamara Linux
www.hamaralinux.org
www.twitter.com/hamaralinux