How to respark activity on Enso?

[sirpengi]

I've noticed that there hasn't been very much activity on the Enso
codebase. It's been a little over two months since the last commit
and nothing has been done about the patches that have been submitted.
Now I know you guys are busy with your work over at Mozilla labs (and
its great work too!) but it seems Enso is falling on the wayside with
little news or direction.
I've been poking around at the codebase myself and I've just started
to feel comfortable with the structure of Enso. I would like to get
activity started on it again but I'm not sure as to how best to
approach it. My first inclination is to fork, as I'm still at a
hobbyist level when it comes to python and this would be my first time
working in a collaborative project. However, if you're okay with a
newb like me crashing the party, I'm willing to take on some
administrative responsibilities.

[Guillaume Seguin]

2008/8/11 sirpengi <sirp...@gmail.com>:

FWIW, all my exams are done (and successful! yay!) and I'm slowly
getting back to code, finishing a django website today, planning to
review Enso patches tomorrow or the day after as long as finishing
another website, and then getting Enso to the point it'll start being
really useful and life-critical (hehe). What we could do until the
Humanized guys get a bit of time for us is work on our own branch of
Enso? (git would enable us to do it so easily with easy merges *hint*
*hint*) This would furthermore quickly entitle you to definitely get
commit access (as it's done in most other projects).

--Guillaume

[sirpengi]

With the lack of activity I was amazed that a response came so
quickly!
Anyhow, when I mention forking the project, I didn't mean it in terms
of a proper fork, but rather just a separate repository where work can
be done with the eventual goal of being merged back to the main
project. So basically what you mentioned as 'work on our own branch',
but not technically a branch in the same repository.
I'm not very familiar with git, though I can't imagine how different
it is from subversion. What I had in mind though was to just host it
as another google-code project. It just seems the easiest package
overall as it comes with code browser, issue tracker and wiki for
documentation.

On Aug 10, 4:05 pm, "Guillaume Seguin" <guilla...@segu.in> wrote:
> 2008/8/11 sirpengi <sirpe...@gmail.com>:

[Atul Varma]

Hi Sirpengl,

Sorry we haven't been contributing as much as we'd like to Enso as of late.  As you may know, we've been working on something called Ubiquity:

  http://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity

It's similar to Enso, but restricted to Firefox, and building on a lot of the ideas we had with Enso.  The advantage of being in Firefox is that we have some really awesome web integration and prototyping capabilities, but the downside, of course, is that the software doesn't live up to its namesake--it's not truly ubiquitous like Enso is.  So one of the things we'd like to do really soon is build a bridge that allows Enso to communicate with Ubiquity, which we're hoping will help unite the two projects a bit more.

In the meantime, though, you're also welcome to create a branch on the Enso repository and work in there, running any changes you want to make to the trunk by this mailing list before doing so.  Let me know if you want access to do that and I'll set it up; alternatively, if you want to follow Guillaume's advice and use your own git repository, that's totally cool too.  Thanks for taking an interest in the project!

- Atul

[Guillaume Seguin]

2008/8/11 sirpengi <sirp...@gmail.com>:

>
> With the lack of activity I was amazed that a response came so
> quickly!
> Anyhow, when I mention forking the project, I didn't mean it in terms
> of a proper fork, but rather just a separate repository where work can
> be done with the eventual goal of being merged back to the main
> project. So basically what you mentioned as 'work on our own branch',
> but not technically a branch in the same repository.
> I'm not very familiar with git, though I can't imagine how different
> it is from subversion. What I had in mind though was to just host it
> as another google-code project. It just seems the easiest package
> overall as it comes with code browser, issue tracker and wiki for
> documentation.
>

The git bit was just my usual pro-git advocacy :p svn is perfectly fine too :)

--Guillaume

[Stuart Langridge]

> I've noticed that there hasn't been very much activity on the Enso
> codebase. It's been a little over two months since the last commit
> and nothing has been done about the patches that have been submitted.
> Now I know you guys are busy with your work over at Mozilla labs (and
> its great work too!) but it seems Enso is falling on the wayside with
> little news or direction.

I've got various patches kicking around that would be useful. Opening
up a "community" branch to the code and giving commit access to some
people (as Atul suggests) would be a jolly good idea, I think. I've
been trying to avoid publishing to my own svn server precisely so as
not to fork :)

sil

--
New Year's Day --
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
-- Kobayashi Issa

[sirpengi]

Atul Varma et al,
Thanks for the support. I'd be interested in taking part of a
community branch on the Enso repository. Could you also enable the
wiki? I think my first foray will be in providing some more
documentation.

[Atul Varma]

Sirpengi,

Sure thing--I've just made you a project member, which should give you commit access to the wiki and svn, but if it doesn't, let me know.  Stuart, I'd like to make you a project member too, but you need a google account.

For anyone else who's reading this and would like to work on a branch, please feel free to send me an email or post to this list directly.  The reason that forking seems a bit extreme to me right now isn't because of what it could mean for the codebase, but for the community: to me, a fork implies a bifurcation of code and community, while branching only pertains to the former.  So while forking is certainly always an option, I'd much rather be able to keep everyone in the same loop so we can easily see all the interesting things we're working on and discuss them together. :)

- Atul