UWS open source projects

[Kalakian]

Thanks to Ross Drew for sparking this idea, with a simple comment here, followed by my comment straight after it.

The idea would be that UWS undergaraduate students and alumni could get involved in making cross platform open-source projects (primarily, but not limited to games). The project could be set up on sourceforge where anybody could contribute. The project would need (a) lead developer(s) for the purpose of making sure only UWS students and alumni could contribute, while anybody in the world could view the project source and binaries. I volunteer for (initially) taking on this responsibility.

We could have sub projects so that there would be something for everybody to work on ... not everybody likes FPS or RPG. The subprojects would probably have somebody in charge to steer the project, probably the person(s) that started that project.

At first I would recommend keeping to small projects to see how (if) this would work, but that would be at the discretion of the sub-project lead(s).

This has the potential to give students experience in creating (and managing) team projects to create a viable (yet freely available) application, adding to their portfolio. It would also allow for those with more experience to pass it on to the others.

So, how much is everybody going to laugh at me for this idea? Any comments, feel free to post (unless they're flamey cos I'm still an admin :)

[J]

Sounds like a great idea.

[Ross Forshaw]

The use of SourceForge is a good idea. However I would raise questions on having different projects under one Banner with SourceForge. It's features outside of the SVN, is limited. Like forums

Probably a better idea is to create a central website that can manage multiple separate projects, but also allows for a central user base. Probably one of the wiki programs is best for this. Like: wordpress.org

A good structured forum will also greatly help. :)

And probably some form of "Hello World" starting project to get the ball rolling.

[Kalakian]

Cheers for this Ross.

As I have very little experience in using sourceforge, I don't know what limitations they have. What you suggest does make sense, and I assume we could allow dev access to each project to be limited to only the group members, and read access to all?

Once I get this marking out the way (Friday at the latest), I'll set-up a basic website and a "Hello World" project, then we can take it from there.

I would suggest that we have a basic naming convention for the projects though e.g. they all start with 'UWS_' or something like that, just to show that the project has been developed using the UWS open source project umbrella.

[Kalakian]

Wordpress.org seems to be blogging software, not wiki. At least that's what it says on the homepage.

[Ross Forshaw]

Aah yes, I've just remembered that. :(

Redmine, is probably a better choice: http://www.redmine.org/

Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database.

Redmine is open source and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL).
Overview¶

* Multiple projects support
* Flexible role based access control
* Flexible issue tracking system
* Gantt chart and calendar
* News, documents & files management
* Feeds & email notifications
* Per project wiki
* Per project forums
* Time tracking
* Custom fields for issues, time-entries, projects and users
* SCM integration (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs)
* Issue creation via email
* Multiple LDAP authentication support
* User self-registration support
* Multilanguage support
* Multiple databases support


Kalakian said:

Wordpress.org seems to be blogging software, not wiki. At least that's what it says on the homepage.

[Kalakian]

Looks good. I can set this up in my webspace, or home server if need be. At least temporarily anyway - I'll have a proper look at it l8r.

[Ross Drew]

Yeah, sounds like a great idea. I'd be more than happy to contribute to this.

I don't understand the thoughts against Sourceforge though, their SVN is really useful for multiple developers and allows read access, download options and pretty decent statistics. As far as the forums go we could just have the project web page link point to a forum of our choosing. But to be fair, I've never really used it extensively (only for a few really basic projects) and never tried any others so I'm probably not the best person to make actual decisions here.

But yea, I'm "game" for this. Are we limiting the language? I mean, Java is multi-platform...but will that count? Or are we hardcore C++ code moneys? I'm fine with either :D

[Kalakian]

I'm a C++ code monkey myself, but reckon we shouldn't put a limit on the language. As long as we can contribute to open source projects, it shouldn't matter the technology used (unless highly proprietary of course) and should be the decision of the particular project's lead developer(s).

When I suggested cross-platform, I really meant the umbrella project should support multiple platforms, but for some projects it might not be feasible to make them cross platform.

[Philip Farquharson]

This is a great idea, and I hope it goes ahead as I would love to contribute.

Just to go back to the early "Sourceforge or not" discussion, Google Code is a good alternative to Sourceforge.

Google Code

[Ross Drew]

I have tried google code briefly. I found it awkward and anti-intuitive but like I say, I only looked at it briefly.

Ok, this leads to development style.

1) Do we assign a bunch of people to a project or allow all contributers to contribute to all projects? Or will there be only a couple people allowed to edit code and everyone else merely suggests changes?

2) We can't just allow anyone and everyone to edit the direct production line code willy nilly; will we create a branch for all changes until they are approved by the group (or what)?

3) Where are the project ideas coming from? I have many :D

[Ross Forshaw]

The best option would be to have 2 branches. The development Branch which designated people of a group(Those directly involved with the project) can update & modify. And a stable branch where only the "Leader" can update.

Ross Drew said:

I have tried google code briefly. I found it awkward and anti-intuitive but like I say, I only looked at it briefly.

Ok, this leads to development style.

1) Do we assign a bunch of people to a project or allow all contributers to contribute to all projects? Or will there be only a couple people allowed to edit code and everyone else merely suggests changes?

2) We can't just allow anyone and everyone to edit the direct production line code willy nilly; will we create a branch for all changes until they are approved by the group (or what)?

3) Where are the project ideas coming from? I have many :D

[Kalakian]

I suggested that the project management of each individual project be left largely up to that project's lead developer(s). This lets us maintain flexibility and gives project management experience to anybody that wants to give it a go.

As for the ideas, once the central website is up and running (almost finished marking, so will look into this in next couple of days), anybody that had an idea could then ask if anybody would be willing to help them create that game. A team could have 1 or 2 contributors, 20 contributors, only undergraduates, only alumni, or a mixture. I would suggest that only alumni teams should be avoided though, to help in passing on experience.

Once the initial test project has been started I'll be posting one of my ideas and trying to get a team together for that, anybody can do the same. We've got to be careful though or everybody could end up working on their own individual projects with no help from anybody else, lol

Edit: For anybody that wants to see a game idea/design that they have worked on, but may be too advanced for them to implement, they could 'advertise' it to get a lead developer and still stay on the core team of the project to steer it in the right direction.