Re: so, what now?

Timandahaf wrote:  [Mon Apr 05 2010, 11:43:56PM EDT]
>First, thanks for starting this thread! I did notice that Tuomov's pages
>were down, but since his whole site was down, I was waiting for it to
>come back without realizing he might have taken the whole project down.
>Quick question: do we know for sure Tuomov has severed connections with
>ion3 permanently or is this our best guess at this point?

While I have great appreciation for Tuomo's work, I don't think
the answer to this question matters to me personally. I am hoping
this fork will succeed because I want to pursue functionality
that has so far been blocked (xinerama, xrandr, xft,
iconization, EWMH, built-in support for idiosynchratic
applications, etc).

>ion3 has been my primary environment for a while now, and I won't
>consider changing. I love its design, philosophy, and simplicity, but
>I'm preaching to the choir here.

:-)

>I'm all for forking into /one/ fork, and that too only because of the
>licensing issue--please lets not make multiple messy forks. Like a few
>of you, I don't have much time either right now, but expect to be able
>to contribute a more a few months down the line. But I can contribute
>towards getting us going right now if needed.

This is the same position I am in.

>We have at least a few tasks to accomplish ASAP just so we don't lose
>continuity or momentum (please suggest other things that need to be done
>too):
>
>- We need a new name and so far, I personally like both "notion" (my top
>  favorite) and "neon". Do we have any other nominations? Note that we
>  can always change the name later. It's good to get moving on things
>  even based on a temporary name if we can't reach consensus.

I've liked a number of suggestions, including particleman, but
notion remains my first choice.

>- We need to get the codebase including the latest set of sources (easy,
>  many of us have this), and also as much of the associated git repos as
>  we can.

I think we should put the current source as-is in a repo, then do
a massive s/ion3/newname/ and modify the top-level documentation
to mention our debt to Tuomo and the heritage of the project,
while pointing users away from Tuomo and to a new bug tracker and
mailing list.

In other words I think the pristine source should be the first
commit to the repo, so even the initial modifications (including
the name change) are recorded.

We should plan to make a first release within a couple months,
containing the simple combination of renamed-ion3 with the
existing out-of-tree modules we collect. Releasing early before
going into more serious development should help us gain momentum
quickly.

>- We need a central place to get ourselves organized and store code. I
>  nominate sourceforge (well established, well known, supports git).
>  I've speculatively created a new 'notion' project (we can change name,
>  details, or even the site later):
>
>  http://notion.sourceforge.net/

Looks good, thanks!

>- We need 2 or 3 managers and/or lead devlopers. IMHO, managers do not
>  /necessarily/ need to have in-depth code knowledge, and lead
>  developers do not need to necessarily manage, though this can all be
>  the same person. Any volunteers?

I will be happy to contribute on both fronts after a couple
weeks. Right now I'm in crunch mode toward releasing a product at
work so I won't be able to immediately commit any substantial
time toward notion.

Regards,
Aron