[Adium-devl] Some disclosure and some ideas.

Thu Dec 7 17:33:35 UTC 2006

First of all, congrats!  That sounds like an awesome opportunity.

I'd like to comment on the developer community comment you made.  I'm one
that _really_ wants to get involved in the development of Adium.  Of course
life tends to get in the way sometimes.  For me personally, I've got a full
time job and I'm a graduate student, in addition to a bunch of other typical
life things.  At the same time I really want to lend a few hours a week to
Adium and working on code to help.  I wish I had some suggestions on how the
process of getting new people up to speed could be made better.  The Map of
Adium is going to help once it's completed but it's certainly hard to wrap
your head around something like Adium without some help.

Chris Stewart

On 12/7/06, Colin Barrett <timber at lava.net> wrote:
>
> First off, I'd like to fully disclose that starting January 8th, I'll
> officially be an employee of the Mozilla Corporation, which is wholly
> owned by the Mozilla Foundation. I'll be working on making Firefox a
> better browser on the Mac, and I presume lending my voice and Mac
> expertise/sensibilities to the development of Mozilla 2.0 (basically,
> a restructuring of the Moz code to make it more manageable and
> maintainable). I spent some time there this week, and both Adium and
> Growl got a bit of a cheering and some applause when they were
> mentioned at my introduction -- a lot of people there use MacBooks and
> run Adium on them :)
>
> Despite my newfound employment, I'm definitely going to try to remain
> involved with the project. I've ben doing this for four years, why
> stop now? :)
>
> Anyway, on to the meat of the email, which is mostly just a bunch of
> lists. Firstly: Adium development has slowed down a bit over the past
> couple of months, with school and what not, but things tend to pick up
> during the holidays, so I just wanted to throw out some things I think
> we should be getting done in the next month or two:
>
> - Finally release 1.0.
> - Finish our plugin architecture. I think we are most of the way to
> getting something we can support at least some initial development on.
>
> In the more long term, I think we should try to get some of these
> things done, for the health of the project:
>
> - Codify our procedures that are in place, and document more of our
> community structure on our wiki. The PatchMaster idea was a good one,
> but I think it should be retooled to reflect reality, where we have
> reviewers who check things in. For example, I think we should make
> sure that anything major that gets checked in to a release branch or
> trunk gets looked at by at least one set of eyes. We don't need to
> institute a formal code review process (yet), but what we've been
> doing with branches seems to work well, and I think that definitely
> should be written down and codified somewhere.
> - After doing the above, we should look at our practices and see what
> we can do better, and how we can keep things involved. I've noticed
> that the Mozilla projects tend to have weekly meetings on IRC, with an
> agenda on the wiki people can add things to. Perhaps we ought to give
> that a shot? There are a bunch of other things we can try, too.
> - Finish the unit testing work. This is so important, it will allow us
> to track regressions and keep us from doing the two steps forward, one
> step back dance.
> - Perhaps investigate a different SCM system. Subversion is fantastic,
> but I think we have already started to see some limitations of it's
> merge and branch support. That said, svn 1.5 has improvements in this
> area, so we'll see. That said, it wouldn't hurt to do a test import
> into various other SCMs (darcs? Mercurial? git? Bazaar?), if anyone is
> interested. Perhaps we can recruit someone on IRC or something.
>
> Some thoughts on remaining relevant as a product:
>
> - Jabber. Turning Adium into a top notch Jabber client is how we're
> gonna remain relevant in the future, IMO, and we're doing a lot
> already, and I think we should continue on this.
> - MSN. Our MSN support sucks, and it's our most popular protocol.
> There isn't a whole lot we can do to libgaim, but we should definitely
> keep our eyes peeled.
> - Events. I think one way to compete with iChat 4 (which has many of
> our features), is to add much more robust events system with a great
> UI (seee Augie's email thread). Since Leopard is coming out in the
> spring, I really think this is something we should definitely think
> about spending a lot of time on in the coming months.
> - Quicksilver. Adium and QS seem to attract a lot of the same users.
> Eventually I'll get around to writing one, but I encourage someone to
> either continually poke me or to beat me to it :)
> - Audio/Video. We're making (slow) progress in this area, which is
> good (and not so good). We're eventually going to need it to compete,
> there's just no question. If anyone has any ideas about how to speed
> this up ($$$?), please, speak!
> - Committers/Community. We've got a great community of triage and
> forum users set up, which is awesome. Now we need to start building up
> our developer community. The Map of Adium Peter has been working on
> (and I've been neglecting — sorry!) is a great start, and I think it's
> something we should focus on. Our numbers are only going to dwindle,
> not grow.
>
> Some updates on things I work on:
> - Shirts have stalled for the moment while I think about
> "distribution" (the term used by companies in that business is
> fulfillment). I may just end up shipping things out of my place in
> California after I move in January. We aren't going to be selling THAT
> many units this time around, at least I don't think.
> - Scrollbar improvements branch: Haven't worked on it in nearly a
> month. I'm fairly sure I can get everything working though, I just
> need to sit down and *do* it.
>
> I think that's most of what I wanted to get down. I'm a bit jetlagged,
> so please excuse any incoherentness.
>
> I've been pretty much off the radar for about a month. What's been
> happening?
>
> Long windedly,
> -Colin
>
>
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-- 
Chris Stewart
compiledmonkey at gmail.com
http://www.compiledmonkey.com
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