[Grok-dev] various balls grok has in the air (and help us catch them)

[Martijn Faassen]

[I posted this through gmane a few minutes ago. It might still show up 
but gmane ate a few of my messages this afternoon, so I won't risk it. 
re-posting]

Hi there,

I just went through the mailing list and identifying some of the balls
Grok currently has in the air and hasn't caught yet. That is, tutorials
and other things that haven't appeared on the website yet, and a ton of
other stuff. Please read on and if you can, volunteer! Don't worry,
these tasks are typically minor ones.

If you're already working on this, let us know too and tell us about the
status. If you're blocked by a task, or simply don't have the time to
work on it, please let us know and we can look into getting a volunteer
to take over. There's a lot of effort that we shouldn't let go to waste
but translate into an improved Grok, and improved documentation and
community infrastructure.

Naming discussion
-----------------

* the tutorial/howto/recipe/whatever naming discussion: let's call them
tutorials. The big grok tutorial also needs to be split up into multiple
entry points (besides being readable from beginning to end) and I like
the tagging/trail idea.

Tutorials in progress
---------------------

* SQLAlchemy tutorial - Brandon's still working on this one. Status?

* Traversing/virtual objects tutorial - status, Bradon?

* There's a security getting started tutorial that Luis wrote.
Somewhere. It's not on the website. What's holding it up?

* Sebastian and Wichert wrote some instructions on post-mortem
debugging. Is there something still blocking this from appearing as a
tutorial on our website?

* graphical debugging of Grok with Komodo - by Sebastian. Let's get this
on the website, please.

Potential tutorials/texts
-------------------------

* I realized that we need streamlined information on how to become a
Zope contributor, i.e. how to get SVN access. Right now this information
is scattered through the Zope website. Could someone write a few lines
of text pointing people into the right direction, the right forms, etc,
so we can put it online?

* We need a tutorial on how to actually maintain the website docs. Let's
put this online in easy reach so people can see how easy this really is.
:) Both this entry and the one above seem to call for a 'grok
development' section on the website.

* We also need a very simple buildout tutorial. It should contain stuff
like: now you have your grok installed with grokproject, and you want to
start using some Zope 3 extension (let's say hurry.query). What do you
do? (Modify setup.py, run bin/buildout). Any takers?

Links on the website
--------------------

* We have an updated Mammoth Herd example. Can this be put in
svn.zope.org perhaps? Can we then link to it from grok.zope.org?

* IRC logs are being maintained. We need a link to here:
http://jw.n--tree.net/irclogs/%23grok/

* we have a wiki here: http://wiki.zope.org/grok/GrokWiki
   Let's make this visible and make a clear link to this on the
homepage. *also* put a link on the tutorials page saying this is where
you might find more information. Tutorials in a less finished state
might make it there. Maybe eventually we'll maintain all our tutorials
there, if we get enough wiki gardeners at least to ensure quality (see
below)

Wiki gardening
--------------

* Some of the information on the grok wiki is already out of date: the
windows installation section for instance which doesn't work anymore
after Grok 0.10's release. We need wiki gardeners who can go in and
aggressively fix stuff. If this is working well, we can start shifting
more of our documentation in the wiki.

Coding
------

* We need to update NudgeNudge to use the newer buildout.cfg. Should be
a minor task.

* has the old 'fields:" support (which we deprecated in favor of
schemas) been removed from the grok core yet? CHANGES.txt doesn't say it
has been, so I'm assuming it hasn't. :)

* the Grok core still contains BBB comments in various places. These are
deprecated things and can probably be safely removed (if the volunteer
is unsure, discuss it on the list). Someone wants to volunteer and
remove these?

* is grok2html still breaking on unicode characters in restructured
text? This needs to be fixed if so. If something is blocking a fix,
let's discuss options.

Regards,

Martijn