[pypy-dev] PyPy work plan

[Laura Creighton]

Hi Simon.  I never like to quote somebody's email without
informing them.  I am about to use ICCARUS (why 2 Cs) as an
example of what I am looking for.  The rest is the middle
of a discusison that you are not expected to understand.
Thank you for ICCARUS.  -- Laura

In a message of Sat, 18 Aug 2007 13:26:55 +0200, Maciek Fijalkowski writes:
>
>As you probably have observed already, for the last few months pypy
>is slowly approaching "being usable" state instead of "having more 
>ultra-cool
>features", as we've got enough of them to be willing to use them.
>As we're moving towards maintaining pypy as an open source project I woul
>d
>suggest to look around parts of pypy and have list
>of people who are willing to maintain certain parts. Maintain not in a se
>nse
>of developing those, but rather accepting/rejecting patches, keeping it u
>p
>to date with other parts, etc. I would also suggest
>to move parts with no obvious maintainer somewhere else in svn
>(branch? tag?) not to confuse people who checkout whole svn repository
>with parts never used by anyone. This option would make it easier to:
>
>* have people entering project, since it would be obvious who to
>  contact for different parts.
>
>* maintain whole codebase, since some cleanup changes are pervasive
>  enough to break different parts.
>
>* this would also hopefully reduce whole code size.
>
>I've also checked in pypy parts (more or less) into
>http://codespeak.net/svn/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/maintainers.txt
>feel free to add yourself wherever you like and to modify this list as we
>ll
>
>What do you think?
>
>Cheers,
>fijal

As mentioned just in irc, I am unhappy with the dividing up of
pypy into pieces with maintainers.  That way the people who 
envision the small can dominate those who envision the large,
and one of the strengths of this project is the sheer visionary
power of some of its members.

on the other hand, some tidying would be nice.
and we sure as hell could be friendlier for newbies.

I am now looking at code visualisation tools, and time visualisation 
tools.  I get the idea that if we could visualise things better,
we could undersgtand who knows what about what, and what else,
then we would need less in the way of 'task management'.

for static things
I am thinking of:

http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/
or everything at the top level simile.mit.edu domain.

But then yesterday I read this on the pygame mailing list.
.....
From: "Simon Wittber" <simonwittber at gmail.com>
To: pygame-users at seul.org
Subject: [pygame] 3D Social Network Visualisation

A few evening ago we demonstrated ICCARUS at a web party. It is a
piece of software which provides a visualisation of social networks in
three dimensions :-)

It uses pygame and a Pyrexed OpenGL lib called GFX.

You can see screencast here: http://scouta.com/faves/8raO17jT8Y3/

and a vid of the presentation here:
http://blog.viddler.com/cdevroe/webjam-iccarus/

Thanks to python and pygame, this project was conceived and
implemented over 3 days.
......

I thought this was way cool.  Especially the 3 days part.

I want our code base to work like this.

Who knows what?
stuff that everybody knows, stuff that carl freidrich and armin
and maciek and samuele know, stuff that nobody knows but samuele,
and even -- 'stuff that nobody knows' somebody did at one time
but we all have forgotten by now.


This is a half-baked proposal for code base management,
normally I would not mention this at all, but some of us are
getting grumpy, and I thought that other ideas, however
weird might be welcome.

Laura