A.k.a.: Andrew van der Stock
Super Administrator
Lead Developer
Posts: 67
Threads: 40
Registered: August 26th, 2002
Member Is Offline
Location: Geelong, Victoria
Theme: GaiaBB Pro Grey
Mood: In the family again
posted on March 21st, 2010 at 09:42 PM
Development Blog
Hi there,
I need to provide the OLPC project updates on a regular basis, so I will use this post as my repository of interesting changes and events.
I think we need to change the milestones so I can get the system out to end users quicker. Therefore, the first release of GaiaBB will be the XS
School Server edition.
This edition will not support replication, but will be integrated with Moodle, so accounts created at the school for Moodle, will not require
re-entering in the forum - students will be automatically provisioned the first time they use the forum from their XO. Log in will also use the
mechanism that Moodle uses, so in theory, if they can use Moodle, they don't need to re-enter any credentials to GaiaBB.
Besides integration with Moodle's (and the XS's) authentication, there will be a few other changes to make sure students can find the forum and
interact with it. Primarily, this includes whatever is required to make GaiaBB show up on the My Neighborhood screen.
The goals for this release are:
High quality release - all known bugs ironed out prior to release
SQL injection has to be gone. I will be converting as much of GaiaBB user code to prepared statements before release, but the admin tools will
have to wait for a bit unless they can leverage the work found in the user code. The subsequent release to this one will have no dynamic queries and
will work with any PDO compliant database. XS uses MySQL for Moodle, so we're okay to re-use at the moment.
Installer - still to be worked out for XS, but standalone is developing nicely
Simultaneous releases for stand alone and XS editions.
Security patches will be sent out for both editions simultaneously. Languages should be usable by both editions without change. This should reduce the
"forking" that is often seen within open source projects. For example, the multi-user version of Word Press is ancient compared the mainline
version. I don't want that at all.
The plans for a peer to peer version of GaiaBB haven't changed, just re-jigged so I can get something into the hands of the OLPC project quicker.
thanks,
Andrew
vanderaj
A.k.a.: Andrew van der Stock
Super Administrator
Lead Developer
Posts: 67
Threads: 40
Registered: August 26th, 2002
Member Is Offline
Location: Geelong, Victoria
Theme: GaiaBB Pro Grey
Mood: In the family again
posted on April 5th, 2010 at 02:58 PM
Well, it's Easter, and I've been a little busy. I've realised that I need to take "big" development steps out of trunk and into branches. That
way, if a speculative branch like a complete re-write of PMs fails, I can at least keep working on trunk. We have had a lot of bugs outstanding for a
few weeks now, and as it stands, my dev build of GaiaBB simply doesn't run properly enough to make fixing those bugs worthwhile.
So, ..., I'm going to see how I can create a branch without checking in what I have over the top of trunk. Otherwise, I'll end up breaking trunk.
Once I've done that, I'll park the PM changes into a side-branch, and return to hacking on trunk and get some of the bugs down.
In other news, I'm downloading Fedora 12 x64 so I can compile & install OLPC XS School Server on it. That will be my test target for the XS
version of GaiaBB. I have Fedora 12 x86 running, but it has patching issues with the repo (it started life as a live CD, and things have never really
worked out of the box, so I'm declaring that suspect).
thanks,
Andrew
vanderaj
A.k.a.: Andrew van der Stock
Super Administrator
Lead Developer
Posts: 67
Threads: 40
Registered: August 26th, 2002
Member Is Offline
Location: Geelong, Victoria
Theme: GaiaBB Pro Grey
Mood: In the family again
posted on June 15th, 2010 at 10:16 PM
As always, I've been busy. Currently, I'm working a bit too much for my liking, but hopefully, things will get easier soon.
The main thing is to squash defects in the tracker, and get the installer finished ASAP. Once 1.0 is out the door, we can relax, and move on to the
next phase.
