VDF-Guidance changes over to Bazaar

by Wil van Antwerpen, December 28, 2007

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Big changes are in the pipeline for vdf-guidance, actually those changes have been in the pipeline for several months, but only recently the picture became more clear for some or the other reason
Next year, i want to completely change over vdf-guidance from developing in cathedral style to bazaar style.

What does this mean?

This means for example that developers can use Subversion for committing/extracting code to projects available. It also means that you can start a project at vdf-guidance without the project itself having to be complete, so you can invite others to join your efforts. When the project is complete, it still is the intention to offer a "ready to run/compile" zipped up projectfile.
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Another change will be that i will stop providing support for every project on the site as i can use that time better by improving the collaboration features on the site, instead i will forward the question to the project maintainer and have them try to answer the question. Of course you might still find me contributing code to your projects, but it will be via subversion so that the changes are immediately visible for everyone.

The site itself has always been wiki based, so i' will work on extending that too. I'm considering making the wiki-tags Mediawiki compatible and add the possibility for a project maintainer to enable others to edit project descriptions, to name a few things that are floating around in my mind.

As people might know, the site itself is written in DataFlex and runs on webapp. The code is from around 1999 (webapp2.x) and the base for that has progressed quite a bit and is being rolled into a project called SeaWax (formerly also known as "Open eLectos" and "cWebEx") After the vdf-guidance site has changed over to the new codebase, most of it will be made available later under an open source license at http://www.seawax.org as part of the Seawax project.

Basically the changes are centered around the site being able to grow/expand/improve by using the capacities of its user base without needing constant attention from me. So that if i'm too busy, the site still goes forward and is only limited by the user's willingness to share code and knowledge.