Open Source OGS?

[Eugene]

@ckersch

and figure out what some good, common interfaces would look like

I think you are wrong about that (sorry to be blunt about it )

If you are considering new interfaces for a go server backend, you are up for a new front end as well.

The only practical way to make a new backend for OGS, as far as I can see, is to write one that supports the existing interfaces of the current back end. My impression of how these are integrated is that the front end depends critically on how the existing interfaces are - it’s not amenable for a port to some other interface.

[Jirogo36]

The subject of web-development seems to suffer from a chicken-and-egg problem—maybe not for people who learn it at school but for the rest of us—I can’t do interesting things until I’ve learned enough but it’s hard to feel motivated until facing an interesting problem.

This might help:

Wishlist: OGS Tech Blog

So. I know this is fairly cheeky given how hard @anoek and co have been working lately - “do more for our entertainment!”. But it sounds like v5 has been produced on the back of a lot of technical innovation, infrastructure and architecture work. Anecdotally I think a lot of OGS users are technical people. We’d love to hear about this stuff. (Also war stories about the switchover… those are always great.)

Not as a textbook but something that piques interest and maybe teaches a few concepts by assimilation. Most readers probably wouldn’t go on to study web-dev but it should help us understand the site and the dev people better.

@AdamR

It would all be unpaid work and that is hard to do a substantial ammount of even if you really are enthusiastic about the project.

If a person already has the skill and general idea of the site (see above), the person might only need to be enthusiastic about a feature to contribute.

@AdamR

to really check (and let’s face it often fix and repair) sometimes amateur code additions might actually be more time demanding than fixing it himself in due time and when he deems urgent. That also comes with unpleasant pressure to shift priorities, because it would be rude not to check the code somebody donated and leave him/her waiting for a long time.

Let me confess that I’m guilty as charged.

Some points I found interesting:

@taatelikakku

the core dev has to sift through a lot of code and double check and test the contributed code. This may be too much work. So you’d need a bigger team of trusted developers to deal with it.

@yebellz

A good way to work new people onto a complex project is to have them start with only testing/debugging rather than developing new features. This helps them to better understand the code before they make potentially erroneous changes, and they can even help with improving documentation and organization along the way.