mentors.debian.net reloading
Valued community...
We have been running mentors.debian.net for years already and I really
enjoy seeing how many people are using it. It was a lot of effort
writing all the scripts and magic that makes the service useful although
a lot may be hidden in the background. It is watching
debian-devel-changes to see if packages were sponsored. It is monitoring
downloads to give the package maintainer statistical information. It
announces new uploads on IRC. It informs the "Uploaders:". It does a lot
of QA checks etc.
Many parts of the site need improvement though and I received a lot of
feature requests during the last months already. Unfortunately the
Python code isn't something to be entirely proud of. So it makes sense
to rethink and refactor its design instead of quickly adding dirty hacks
to add features.
I read Lucas Nussbaum's blog entry on [0] and while it comes up with
only few things I did not yet have on the todo list I think he's right.
And he motivated me to start working on the concepts these days. So the
goal is to make mentors.debian.net a hybrid of what it currently is
(with cleaner Python code) and a social networking site.
I was also pointed at the svnbuildstat site [1] to gather ideas although
it rather deals with how well the team-maintained packages build. And
there is Ubuntu's effort of "personal package archives" [2] where their
Launchpad application allows people to publish packages they upload.
Last but not least we have the sponsors site [3] run by Neil McGovern
which is also a classic in package sponsoring. I don't think we have
many clashes with other services though. I wouldn't like to steal
anybody's show. Least do I like to hear of other people making similar
efforts. Competition is a good thing of course but I'd find it
demotivating to offer a service and investing a whole lot of spare time
only to find out to be in a race-condition with a competitive project.
That would be a waste of time. I don't want to win a prize. I'd like to
improve the service while making it more useful and having a little fun
while doing that.
So the reason I'm posting here is that I'd like to allow everybody to
contribute ideas and perhaps even manpower to the redesign. In the past
we have started the project as a team but since everyone else had their
own priorities and since such a big project can't be coded in a month
they lost interest so that in the end it was me poor guy being left
alone. I don't mind that but I'd rather enjoy if other enthusiasts would
have fun with concepts, database design, web design, Python/Pylons
coding, doing user support etc. so that we may create an even better
mentors site than it is now.
I have summarized a current list of ideas on my wiki [4]. If you like to
edit the page please register an account at the wiki and mail me your
wiki name. Due to spamming the wiki is read-only for the public crowd by
default.
Feel free to drag items out of that list and discuss it here. I intend
to create a few mockups in the next days so that it may become clearer
what ideas I have on my mind. If you like to get your hands dirty feel
free to subscribe to the mentors-ops [5] mailing list. Hopefully we'll
get a nice team together and have some coding fun.
Thanks for your time.
Kindly
Christoph
[0] http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=258
[1] http://svnbuildstat.debian.net/
[2] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas
[3] http://sponsors.debian.net/
[4] http://workaround.org/moin/MentorsTodoList
[5] http://workaround.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mentors-ops
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