Joerg Jaspert dijo [Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 11:20:32AM +0100]: > As some of you may already know, we think about switching the next > DebConf (not DebConf6 :) ), to another conference management system. As > this is absolutely not intended as "Comas is shit, we change, no matter > what" but more a "Look for other options we may have" we started a wiki > page to list all our requirements we have. Ok, I think you expect an answer from me here ;-) I agree with your denied appreciation ;-) Comas is currently in a flux state, which does not help its reliability, but as I am using the beast for each time more conferences, it is evolving. Those of you who took part of the DC5 organization will remember (IIRC) Comas was more solid - This is because it was way more rigid. I think that Comas' main feature now is its flexibility... In the back end. The transition to the flexibilized back end was a bit painful, as too many things changed in the assumptions I could do in the database, so we had stupid problems (such as the logins not being forced to unique values). The problems seem to be over, fortunately. The front end is crufty, and I would not dare to say it's maintainable. You all know I have been bragging about rewriting it since last July, but the first months I had no pressing need to do so, and the last ones, I've been busy as hell. Now, Comas is becoming an official project of my institute (they were delighted at the amount of data I was able to promptly give and at the organizative facilities it provided for the conference we had last week, yay! :) ), so I hope/trust I will be able to work more on it. The system's main shortcoming is its lead developer. I suck. My lack of time sucks. My management of the little time I do have in my hands sucks. But Comas rules ;-) When we started the project, we found no other usable system powerful enough to handle a medium/complex conference. Today, after a quick search, I found at least 8 projects (plus at least another one I know of that didn't appear in the search) - I cannot right now devote to installing and using each of them, but I can try to compare them to what I know. I'll go to the wiki :) Now, something we didn't originally think of, but has gradually become obvious: Comas is not simply a conference management system - it is a conference management framework. Why? On one side, because it was meant to be heavily hacked on (i.e. the templates are supplied in examples/templates/consol for Spanish and examples/templates/icgtmp for English - Yes, the names of the two conferences we first managed in each of those languages ;-) ). It is meant for whoever installs it to be able to understand my and my co-developer's idiosincracies - even worse, our idiosincracies in 2003. That might be the main reason we have had few installs. I plan this to change, and I plan to provide a framework _and_ a system that uses it _correctly_. Of course, this all takes time. I perfectly understand Debconf cannot hold for me to play with my code - and if we have to install a new system because it is better for the organization, I won't feel bitter about it. Or at least, I'll try to hide it ;-) Greetings! -- Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244 PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23 Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
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