[OSGeo-Discuss] Small projects

[Daniel Brookshier]

On a lot of sites we use 'category' which is a special project type  
to group group projects. This lets you aggregate a group of related  
projects and put a little organization around them.

Daniel Brookshier
Community Manager
214-207-6614

On Mar 4, 2006, at 4:03 AM, Cameron Shorter wrote:

> Chris Holmes wrote:
>> Frank Warmerdam wrote:
>>> Ari Jolma wrote:
>>>
>>>> Is there any idea in promoting projects, which develop small,
>>>> well-defined, interoperable tools? Is my impression correct that  
>>>> the
>>>> process that's been thought of for projects to join the  
>>>> foundation is a
>>>> bit heavy and perhaps not suitable for small projects? I believe
>>>> promoting interoperability is one of the foundations aims.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Ari,
>>>
>>> I have been asking myself this question too.  The "Project"  
>>> infrastructure,
>>> requiring a PSC, an incubation period, committer agreements, web  
>>> sub-domain
>>> and so forth seems pretty heavy.  So, I am doubtful that it would be
>>> appropriate to handle more modest sized project that way.   I  
>>> have been
>>> asking myself a similar question about things like libtiff,  
>>> libgeotiff,
>>> PROJ.4, MITAB, AVCE00 and Shapelib.  My conclusion so far is that  
>>> they
>>> might be better handled as a sub-project of an existing major  
>>> project
>>> (such as GDAL for the above file translators).   I am assuming  
>>> that a
>>> sub-project would not need a PSC, but would be subject to the PSC of
>>> the project it is part of and mostly would just act as a part of  
>>> that
>>> project as far as the foundation is concerned.
>> I've been thinking about this approach as well.  Apache definitely  
>> works that way, with db and jakarta.  And I think would work well  
>> for some of the sub-projects of the more established communities.   
>> It also might make sense to have a 'front end' project, that  
>> groups together mapbender and mapbuilder, and other lighterweight  
>> web clients could also go in to that group.  Not that they  
>> wouldn't each have their own PSC, but such a grouping might be  
>> nice.  Something like quickWMS could live in that group without a  
>> PSC, for example.
>
> What I like about the Apache style is that the look for projects  
> which will grow and will be supported when the author or sponsoring  
> company looses interest.
>
> So for all projects, I'd be looking to find a community who will  
> continue to maintain the project when the author(s) move on.  In  
> the case of a library, the projects which use the library are  
> likely to take over the maintainance of that project.  In this case  
> the library could be bundled with the project which uses it.
>
> However, I don't think it makes sence to bundle similar projects  
> unless they share each other's code.  Eg, quickWMS shouldn't be  
> bundled with Mapbuilder just because they do the same sort of  
> thing.  If the author(s) of quickWMS looses interest, Mapbuilder  
> developers are probably not going to take over the development of  
> quickWMS.  (They will be more interested in the Mapbuilder code).
>
> -- 
> Cameron Shorter
> http://cameron.shorter.net
>
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