TiddlyWiki Hangout #96 will be on Thursday 28th January at 3pm GMT/UTC

[Jeremy Ruston]

I hope you will be able to join me for TiddlyWiki Hangout #96 on Thursday 28th January at 3pm GMT/UTC. You are welcome to take part as a guest or you can view the proceedings live or from the archive.

Jed Carty will be joining me to talk about the work he’s been leading in the community on federation, with some exciting experiments to show.

I’d also like to take the chance to do some thinking about the goals and roadmap for the project in 2016.

http://hangout-96.tiddlyspot.com/

https://plus.google.com/events/cierbql0khu11gtcc4d00t6pkjg

As ever, please reply here if there’s anything you’d particularly like to see discussed.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

[Felix Küppers]

Hi Jeremy,

just a quick question: In the agenda-wiki you wrote "Planning for finishing TiddlyWiki5". Could you explain that line a bit further? Thanks.

-Felix

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[Alex Hough]

Hello,

"finishing TiddlyWiki5?" -- got me worried! What would we all do if it were finished? 

Alex

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/BLU437-SMTP8441FB950C8C8F11D0A76FCED80%40phx.gbl.

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Felix, Alex,

Don’t be alarmed! And my apologies for being gnomic. I’ve added a note clarifying what I meant by the word “finish”:

That's "finish" in the sense of "fit and finish", not in the sense of "come to an end”

finish |ˈfɪnɪʃ| verb [with obj.]: "complete the manufacture or decoration of (an article) by giving it an attractive surface appearance"

What I’m getting at is plugging the big gaps where there are only proof-of-concept level implementations of key areas of functionality (eg plugin library, multi-user client-server operation, federation, image editting, and quite a few more). I don’t want to move on from TiddlyWiki5, but by the time we get to November it will be 5 years since I left BT to work on it, and before then I’d like to be free of the burden of its incompleteness. I think a big part of that is about continuing to lower the barriers to contribution so that more people can work on it. Hence wanting to talk about it at the hangout: we’ve got some talented people here, and if there’s a clear roadmap it should be possible to work together to get things done quickly and enjoyably.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/CALc1hYe7O3r0yF4i9TiqjDVnq9q4_KetupGx4iFzmSKZhDJL5w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Mat]

What a relief. I thought he meant Finnish. He's been going on and on about "open source" in the Swedish attempts to buy TW so seeing the Finns get it would be a real downer.

Seroiusly... I'm glad you clarified Jeremy. Even double glad for the particulars in your clarification.

This is one hangout I definitely don't want to miss!

<:-)

[Felix Küppers]

> Don’t be alarmed! And my apologies for being gnomic. I’ve added a note
> clarifying what I meant by the word “finish”:

Thanks for the clarification, makes more sense now :)

[Jeremy Ruston]

> Thanks for the clarification, makes more sense now :)

Just to let you know that I’ve added a bunch of material to the agenda wiki:

http://hangout-96.tiddlyspot.com/

I’ve attached a PDF snapshot for the record.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

[David Gifford]

I was afraid he meant fine-ish. As in more or less fine. Good-ish. TiddlyWiki needs to be more than fine-ish. It needs to be very fine!

Dave

[David Gifford]

Sorry I will miss the hangout...again...my classes are no longer on Tuesdays but on Weds and Thursdays...then you guys go and schedule the hangout for Thursday during my class time...But to be honest I won't probably be able to attend any until late Feb at the earliest, too much going on here. Blessings,

Dave

On Tuesday, January 26, 2016 at 4:03:04 AM UTC-6, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

[Tobias Beer]

Hi Jeremy,

I'd love to hear a quick word as to if and how

Arlen's update to TiddlyWiki5 in the Sky can / will be incorporated.

Ideally, user's will be able to handle both TW2 and TW5,

perhaps by choosing a type of session at the beginning.

Best wishes,

Tobias.

[Alex Hough]

i hope i can make it...

if I can't I'd like to emphasise two under-rated features

encryption

drawing

how i laughed when i searched my computer and thought i'd lost a TW -- when i had encryped it so my computer couldn't search the TW

sweat_smile

Alex

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[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

Under the heading of making TW more Finnish, I'd like to push a pet topic of mine — a "last pass" over TW's basic wikitext to address whether it's indeed complete and whether it could bear the weight of some minor late-in-the-game revisions:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tiddlywiki/ek8HdyCJLq0

—

On Wednesday, January 27, 2016 at 8:18:04 PM UTC-5, David Gifford wrote:

I was afraid he meant fine-ish. As in more or less fine. Good-ish. TiddlyWiki needs to be more than fine-ish. It needs to be very fine!

Most of my TiddlyWikis are Near Mint, but I have some that show signs of wear, like slight discoloration around the widgets or loose binding in the dictionary tiddlers.  ;)

[Jeremy Ruston]

Thanks everybody, I’ve made some updates to the agenda:

http://hangout-96.tiddlyspot.com/

Best wishes

Jeremy.

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[Mat]

I hope LoweringBarriersToContribution is still on the agenda even if it doesn't appear in the agenda tiddler...

<:-)

[Tobias Beer]

Hi Mat,

 

I hope LoweringBarriersToContribution is still on the agenda even if it doesn't appear in the agenda tiddler...

It's in the finishing tiddler.

Best wishes,

Tobias.

[Jeremy Ruston]

TiddlyWiki Hangout #96 is about to start.

Watch at

https://plus.google.com/events/cierbql0khu11gtcc4d00t6pkjg

or join in at

https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/hoaevent/AP36tYdD-qopv81h6IzMTlW-8fg2Z00GHNLh61ShGbKzListFjmZnA

Best wishes

Jeremy.

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[Devin Weaver]

Apologies for missing the Hangout; Eastern time (UTC-5:00) was work time for me and couldn't participate.

Been reading Making Your Open Source Project Newcomer-friendly and one of the items made me pause. They reference https://gitter.im/ as an option of real time chat. I've found great value working on open source projects using IRC, Slack, and Gitter. Since Gitter is free and requires nothing more then a GitHub account to participate it is an excellent option for chatting about a project. I think this would be especially useful for pair programming on issues. I imagine a scenario were an issue is presented and someone wants to look at it so they work out a schedule and jump into Gitter to chat about it and possibly start a pairing session. Currently the only blocker is you have to be the owner/collaborator of the TiddlyWiki repo in order to start the TiddlyWiki chat. Once complete the link could be added to the HelloThere tiddler.

Also I think there are three key points to helping contributions.

1. Automated Testing - Has a very-high implementation cost but would be worth working on even if down a little at a time. (long term milestone?)
2. Well structured contributing guidelines - I think expanding the http://tiddlywiki.com/dev/ edition to include instruction on contribution, basic Pull Request workflows, Git basics, and commit/branch guidelines would be a huge win.
3. Mentoring - I think it would help if seasoned contributors would be willing to jump on new comers' Pull Requests and Issues and help them to start a Pull Request, Rebase a Pull Request, guidance on coding (maybe with a live session on https://jsbin.com or https://jsfiddle.net), guidance on good Git etiquette, etc. Again a chat channel like Gitter would make this process more approachable for everyone.

From personal experience I can say that there are a few sticky points I had when starting to contribute to TiddlyWiki. At first the architecture/code base was foreign to me. I didn't know where to start looking. Most of the docs on the Widgets, Plugins, etc. were lacking detail and I had to fall into reading lots of the code to understand what I could do or not do. And how to workaround a lot of the assumptions put in place. For example the whole mixing the concepts of a DOM tree and a Widget (under the hood they are essentially the same thing) or the lack of conceptual separation between the Node.JS environment and the Browser environment (same code runs on both; guarded by $tw.browser / $tw.node checks) or when to add a feature via crafted tiddlers versus JavaScript plugins.

The other hurtle I had in general when contributing to any open source project was coping with criticism and feedback with Pull Requests. This was difficult because of how the process of Pull Requests are in general. It took me quite some time to be comfortable with putting a ton of work on something, packaging it up, and sending it to be reviewed only to find all the things I did wrong and should have done differently. Normally this is constructive criticism but there is that frustration and disheartening that happens. A better mental model would be to have an organic conversation where the thought process and work could be discussed as it being worked on. GitHub doesn't do much for facilitating that organic communication which is why I postulate most new comers are more comfortable submitting an Issue rather then working on code changes for a Pull Request. It needs a level of confidence for the later to make it over the mental hump. I'm not sure if the Patch Workflow changes any of that or if live conversations (chats) would change things. Perhaps this point is an invitation for discussion.

[Matabele]

Hi

A few matters arising from the hangout with regard lowering the barriers to contribution (I am still in the process of overcoming them):

1. The style guide for code was hard to find.

Although I now have a copy of TiddlyWiki/Dev on my HDD, I couldn't tell you where to find this on the www. This suggests a necessity for a new 'field' in the ControlPanel/Info -- namely a "Loaded From" field.

It would be nice if this were automatically filled in whenever a wiki loads from a url  but, if this were technically difficult, it could be manually entered by the author. This needs some king of switch mechanism, as it would be useless if I downloaded a wiki from the www, saved it to a path on my HDD, and when I reloaded, the field reported the path on my HDD.

2. In addition to a style guide, we need to publish settings for a few of the common automated formatters.

I currently tend to use JSFormat which uses the jsbeautify library, and/or Atom Beautify, as I find these can be configured to closely match the TW style. There are likely a few other auto formatting libraries fro which settings needs be published.

3. The TW style makes auto-formatting difficult.

       (a) all of the libraries use a space after the comma in function parameters by default. There's a good reason for this; parameters lists can then be wrapped at one of these spaces at the desired wrapping width (another standard which should be set; perhaps 80.) Why not adopt this convention as standard in the TW code style?

       (b) the (function(){  })(); wrapper necessitates a manual reformat: firstly, to remove the additional tab between the wrappers, and secondly, to insert a space before the first curly bracket (which is required for all other functions.)

       

4. There is a need for good documentation describing the whole process of setting up a standard development environment for TW using a selection of common editors, git and Github (something akin to gitflow.) I might undertake this at some stage, but as this is still a work-in-progress for me, I can't at this time.

6. A niggle, but one that needs attention: https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5/pull/2227

For the past 6 months I was unable to use git for TW5, or build a nodejs version from the master repo due to this bug. I thought this resulted from something in my environment and went through several cycles of deleting all of my branches in an attempt to fix this. Only recently did someone identify a fix (my PR's now have to include this fix, as I had to merge the fix into my branch to continue working on Github.)

7. Points 2 and 3 would go a long way toward tidying up commit histories, but:

(a) a guide is still needed with respect how to collapse my own commit histories into a single commit to the master repo

(b) a guide is still needed with respect how to separate the file changes into separate commits to the master repo (once collapsed.)

regards

[Matabele]

P.S.

Something I omitted: the need for better documentation for the available core functions, including a detailed description of the type and purpose of each input parameter and the returned output (even a listing of what's available would be useful.) I often write code, only to later find a core function which I could have used.

regards

On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 12:03:04 UTC+2, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

[Matabele]

Hi

A couple of ideas re: plugin libraries:

Could Tobias please document the process of setting up a plugin library like his?

On this score, in order to use Tobias's library, I must first install a plugin. Therefore, why not include plugin library plugins into the tw5 plugin library as a 'hook' into 3rd party plugin libraries?

Perhaps it would be more convenient for some plugin authors to submit their plugins to a 3rd party plugin library than to the core?

In summary: the core plugin library should contain mostly plugin library plugins as hooks to 3rd party plugin libraries rather than the plugins themselves -- then, rather than submitting my contribution to the core plugin library, an author can submit to a 3rd party plugin library (or maintain their own 3rd party plugin library.)

This could also help with the TW federation infrastructure: a 3rd party plugin library could be used as a intermediary for communication. In this respect, it might be advantageous to produce an optimised, uglified and stripped down version of the core specifically for the purpose. As it's currently necessary to download the entire wiki to extract a single post or comment -- the version opened in the iframe needs to be as small as possible (all unnecessary functionality removed.)

regards

On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 12:03:04 UTC+2, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

[Matabele]

Hi

I must apologise for this stream of posts :-/

Currently, the Github discussions seem to become cluttered with chat, and the user group gets cluttered with dev stuff, whilst the dev group gets under-utilised. One way to improve matters would be to link each PR or issue on Github to a topic thread on the dev group.

All that's required is to always establish a related topic on the dev group whenever a PR/Issue is submitted on Github, and place links at the top of the dev topic to the related Github discussion and vice versa. This tends to happen anyway, but in a rather haphazard fashion (causing posts that should be on the dev topic to be posted to the Github discussion and vice versa.)

regards

On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 12:03:04 UTC+2, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

[Hegart Dmishiv]

Further to what Matabele just said above, there is the TiddlyWiki Announcements forum which is also underutilized. I was thinking it might be a good place to announce new/updated plugins. Just a thought.

[Matabele]

Hi Hegart

Just tried a post over there as an experiment -- seems that posts need to be approved by a moderator. Seems unnecessary as this isn't the case with the main forums and likely means it won't attract much use (hardly been used since 2011.)

regards

[Jed Carty]

I imagine Tobias could write up a clearer set of steps (or improve this one), but wehn I made my plugin library I wrote how I did it here. http://inmysocks.tiddlyspot.com/#Making%20a%20Plugin%20Library

[Matabele]

Hi Jed

Many thanks -- I think I'll manage with your instructions (don't know until I've tried.)

This stuff need s to be in an easily accessible central repo somewhere -- ah, what we need is a dev plugin :-)

regards

[Tobias Beer]

Hi Matabele,

 

Could Tobias please document the process of setting up a plugin library like his?

In the context of this thread, I think it would do a lot of good for all of us if we started to give the /dev wiki about the same attention (if not a little more, for the time being) as the core documentation at tiddlywiki.com. Yes, I can write a handful of instructions, but possibly they all should eventually be on tiddlywiki.com/dev and not where ever I would quickly publish things.

On this score, in order to use Tobias's library, I must first install a plugin. Therefore, why not include plugin library plugins into the tw5 plugin library as a 'hook' into 3rd party plugin libraries?

That is not exactly true. You simply need to import a tiddler that is NOT a plugin. All it does is to define a path to the library and some field describing that plugin resource. There can sure be a list of trusted plugin sources that actually come shipped with the core... where user's can feel confident that they're not going to install entirely experimental features, but possibly / hopefully the more stable ones.

Also, the entire process of handling the plugin library needs a bit more finishing when it comes to:

• catering for different plugin libraries
• updating installed plugins
• opening a plugin library listing ...as well as closing it

Perhaps it would be more convenient for some plugin authors to submit their plugins to a 3rd party plugin library than to the core?

All that really boils down to what works best. In act, you are totally right that there could be a "public" plugin library where all authors may want to push their plugins to be listed... one that is not necessarily part of the tiddlywiki.com repo. For the moment, I would think the approach of having:

1. either the core plugin library as a source for plugins
   
2. a given author's plugin library as a source for that

...is good enough as it somewhat makes the task of curating all of that one that is well defined in terms of responsibilities: For 1. it would be Jeremy to take the lead ad for 2. a given author. So, yes, there could be:

3. a "community plugin library" where someone would take it upon themselves to:

• review any contributions, possibly also in terms of code
• actively ask authors for contributions to that listing
• manage the whole thing as a repository, possibly published on GitHub

All that is not "far out there" but I imagine it takes a considerable amount of work to actually do... and some(one) willing to pull through the whole process and keep it up... because nothing is possibly as useless as a "community resource" that eventually dries out for there not really being a community to actually maintain it.

In summary: the core plugin library should contain mostly plugin library plugins as hooks to 3rd party plugin libraries rather than the plugins themselves -- then, rather than submitting my contribution to the core plugin library, an author can submit to a 3rd party plugin library (or maintain their own 3rd party plugin library.)

I'd very much advocate this model. So, the task would be to develop a given level of confidence / trust into which of these resources are officially listed / shipped with the core (in terms of "listings"). Quite possibly, the actual plugin libraries themselves could be (selectively) fetched via some form of TWederation:

• "Please give me a list of all plugin libraries, their descriptions and their plugin lists / descriptions ...so I can choose which of those I'd want to include in my wiki to later on pull plugins, even content from."

This could also help with the TW federation infrastructure: a 3rd party plugin library could be used as a intermediary for communication. In this respect, it might be advantageous to produce an optimised, uglified and stripped down version of the core specifically for the purpose. As it's currently necessary to download the entire wiki to extract a single post or comment -- the version opened in the iframe needs to be as small as possible (all unnecessary functionality removed.)

There is definitely room for making servers cough less when shipping TiddlyWikis... I imagine it's a matter of working out the details to that workflow and actually doing it... knowing that this eventually will not be a good environment to debug issues in. ;-)

Best wishes,

Tobias.

[Felix Küppers]

Hi Jeremy,

thanks a lot.

An addition to the multiuser list: What would be extremely beneficial would be if the server would react to filesystem changes and then instantly sync to all clients.

-Felix

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Everybody

Thanks for the great feedback, it’ll take me a while to respond to all the good stuff from everybody, and particularly Devin’s thoughtful post.

And, thanks for everybody’s time with yesterdays hangout, I think it was very useful. The video has been posted if you need to catch up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=janrlFV9yqA

Ironically, I’ve just found a major bug with 5.1.10 that breaks the plugin library:

https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5/issues/2260

I think it’s fixed in the prerelease, but I’d appreciate help testing:

http://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/index.html

If all is well I’ll release 5.1.11 in the next 24 hours.

One final little issue that I’d very much like help with is that my published hangout videos don’t feature YouTube’s usual automatically transcribed captions. I wondered if there was anyone out there who might be able to either fix it so YouTube does give us captions, or be able to run the hangout audio track through a regular transcription app/service.

Many thanks,

Jeremy.

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[Matabele]

Hi Tobias

I have now had a look at the plugin mechanism: since the hooks to 3rd party libraries are only small files, perhaps a single '3rd party plugins' plugin could be added to the core plugins -- containing these files for trusted 3rd party plugin libraries (along with a suitable warning.)

A 3rd party library could do the same -- this would create the necessary distributed network of links to available plugins.

regards

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

@Jeremy:

Did you ever get to see the sidebar transcript?