[Adium-devl] Some disclosure and some ideas.

[Chris Forsythe]

Congrats indeed.

If it helps, I've seen this from a lot of folks. They sit there and 
stair at the code for a while, and then the project. About a month to a 
month and a half in, there's something that just clicks, and then things 
make more sense. Hope that helps.

Chris

Chris Stewart wrote:

> 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 <mailto: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
>