Forum OpenACS Q&A: Package list.

1: Package list.

Posted by Jeff Davis on 12/06/03 05:50 PM

I updated most of the package summary and descriptions in the .info files and generated a full package list at https://openacs.org/packages/

If anyone wants to proof it, make any improvements, changes or additions, such feedback would be welcome. The packages column contains the package key and package name, the description column has the .info summary in bold and the description in plain text.

I think it would be useful to add a package status to the .info files as well indicating the current state of the package (something like under dev, alpha, beta, released). I suppose we could impute that from the version nubmers but that would mean fixing them all too.

The file thats there now is static but is generated with a script Roberto wrote (and which I plan to integrate with the package repository stuff Lars did).

2: Re: Package list. (response to 1)

Posted by Jade Rubick on 12/07/03 09:47 PM

I really like the idea of putting the package status in the .info file. Then if this is integrated into the package respository stuff, we could have this always up to date, and maybe not even have to worry so much about separating code into /contrib and /obsolete in CVS.

Great work, Roberto and Jeff! It looks great.

Shouldn't this be linked in from the front page, and some of the docs?

3: Re: Package list. (response to 2)

Posted by Jeff Davis on 12/07/03 10:22 PM

It is linked from the acs-core-docs doc/openacs-overview.html file (which was why I went and updated them all). It could be linked from some more places but I would prefer to figure out where it will end up when dynamically generated for the repository first.

I am a big advocate of using the info files for keeping track of the state of the packages. I would like to add a couple things to the .info files to make that easier (in particular, I think rather than owner we should have maintainer and credits, with maintainer being the person currently claiming responsibility and credits being anyone who has worked on the package in the past). Right now it feels funny to remove the "owner" (even when they have not worked on the package since acs 4.0 days and have a broken aD email) because it feels wrong to deprive people of credit for the original work.

And as I mentioned before I think a general code quality field would be quite useful as well.

4: Re: Package list. (response to 1)

Posted by xx xx on 12/08/03 02:20 PM

Thanks a lot Jeff.