On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 05:28:34AM -0500, IvorW wrote:
[Christopher Schmidt wrote:]
Many users don't have the ability to install systemwide perl modules, and users like me who don't know perl don't know how to set up the guide to point to a local directory. I think that a self-contained package for OG including all the perl modules which the app needs, and a preset use lib() pointing to a relative directory, would be the most useful thing that OG could do to ease installation.
Maybe PAR is an option. I am successfully using PAR at work. http://search.cpan.org/~autrijus/PAR
I'd like to second this after seeing Ivor's recent presentation about Perl packaging systems at the London Perl Workshop[0]. A PAR file would not only contain all the prerequisites, but Perl Itself. As I understand it, it's a self-extracting zip archive that just runs like an executable. This might work for users who only have shell access. (Although I'm not addressing the issue of setting up the database. Thoughts anyone?)
Right now, OpenGuides feels very much like a UK-centric project. Dom is doing work to correct this, learning about projections and so on.
For which my thanks, and to Kake too for originally sorting out this business with ellipsoids, the mathematics of which I admit is largely beyond me at this point.
a good goal would be to reach out to other global users and try and find guide admins.
I'd also like to try and convince people with "non-OpenGuides Open Guides" (that is to say, who are running a city guide on something like Mediawiki) to Think Differently and Switch (erm...) but that's not going to be easy without whizbang. :)
Talking of attracting people, people who have guides need to pimp^H^Htch to potential users. For a long time I've been meaning to, but never got around to, printing leaflets and stickers for the Open Guide to London. How else can we publicize our guides? Snappy web buttons and banners?
- New Data Format support - I'm thinking something along the lines of providing JSON data interface as well as RDF, to possibly improve the integration with other web or non-web applications.
Data formats are good. Having seen your JSON export, we might as well do a YAML export too since it's similar enough. Why YAML? I don't know really, just in case someone has a cool app that uses it. (I admit that this is a slippery slope!)
I don't know what else is considered Whizbang, but I think those could be neat to take advantage of some of the "OMG AJAX" movement going on in the web world today.
I'd qite like to see OG running under mod-perl.
That'd certainly be whizbang for server admins, anyway. :) Bob showed me some benchmarking output which seems to indicate about 99% of runtime is getting the pre-reqs up and running. But this is another thread in the making, I think.
[0] http://london.pm.org/lpw/talks/2005/ivor_williams-packaging_apps.tar.gz
Cheers,
Earle.