Re: Octave Central (or something like that)

[Søren Hauberg]

Paul Kienzle skrev:
> On Mar 8, 2007, at 6:24 PM, Søren Hauberg wrote:
>
> >   I believe drupal should be able to do most of what we want out of 
> > the box, but it doesn't come for free. Drupal requires more from the 
> > server than static html pages. It's based around PHP and MySQL so it 
> > has some performance requirements. Do we have access to a server that 
> > can provide PHP and MySQL? If not, then I don't think we can create a 
> > "Octave Central".
>
> Hosting Drupal on sourceforge is apparently possible:
>
>    http://starkos.industriousone.com/drupal_on_sourceforge
Great, thanks. It seems like it's just as easy to set it up on SF as it 
is on my own system. My only concern is the speed of the machines at SF. 
The current set of static HTML pages is already fairly slow so I'm 
really concerned about running dynamic pages on SF. But I guess we can 
try it out and see how well it works.

> Ability to upload/download packages is a minimum.  Anything else is 
> optional.
drupal can do this out of the box.

> Some desirable features:
>
> * Signed packages.
What is that?

> * Author email associated with each package (though not necessarily 
> visible).
When you create a user in drupal you have to give an email address. So 
we'll always have the email of whoever uploaded a file. Is that enough?

> * Only authors/administrators can update/remove packages --- we can 
> avoid passwords if package updates are confirmed by email.
We can have several user roles:
  1) Administrators: users that get to change the core of the drupal setup.
  2) Packagers: people allowed to upload files and create/alter pages.
  3) Normal users: people allowed to alter pages (i.e. update 
documentation).

Users that are not logged in will only have read-only access.

> * Issue tracking is useful so long as it is simple, and the submitter 
> doesn't have to have an account.
I don't know if drupal has support for this. But perhaps we should use 
the SF system? (It's enabled now, but not really used).

> * A talk page for each package might be enough, particularly if it is 
> echoed to the author email address.
Users that are logged in can comment on individual packages.

> * Ratings aren't that useful.
Great, one less feature to worry about :-)

> * Download statistics might be nice.
I think drupal supports this, but I'm not sure.

> * Tags would be good, particularly as the number of packages grows.  To 
> make tags more useful, users should have to choose from a tag list.  
> Creating new tags should be difficult.
Again, not sure what's supported by drupal, but I've read that it 
supports tags. Haven't looked into what that actually means.

> * Precompiled binaries for Windows and OS X.
We "just" need somebody to do it :-)

> * Online package docs and source browsing --- make it easy to decide 
> whether a package is worth downloading.
We already has this, so I guess we can use the current system here.

Søren