[pgrouting-users] Get organized and building our community

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Hi all,

The recent up tick in list activity, code development, and interest that 
people have expressed toward getting involved is very exciting and has 
made be realize the we need more organization and some kind of plan on 
how to move forward. The PSC discussed this about a year ago, but we 
never got any critical mass and we had only one developer at the time 
that has since left to work on other projects.

I happen to be on the Mapserver PSC and this is an excellent model for 
us to follow. I will will look at taking the Mapserver PSC process and 
see about editing that to be appropriate for pgRouting and circulate it 
for comment and eventually a vote.

We already have a lot of documentation, wiki, git source respository, 
bug tracking in place.

Daniel - When you have a chance please post a summary with links to the 
various assets.

The areas where we need work (in no particular order) are:

o test suite and automated testing (I recommend we look at what postGIS 
is using)

o we have 2-4 part-time developers that are interest in work, so 
coordination these efforts will be key.

o we have bugs and issues that need to be tracked down and fixed

o we need to review and rewrite the plpgsql wrappers to be schema aware 
and standardize the APIs

o we can always use more examples, and tutorials and the existing 
examples and tutorials may need to be updated to the newer versions of 
postgresql, postgis, and pgrouting

o and we really need to look into make a new release.

o I would like to get our documentation into something like restructured 
text and under version control so it is easy update the website and 
maintain documentation as it is reflected in the code

o if there are people that are interested in translating documentation 
to local languages then we can look into setting up a way to manage that 
also.

o I'm sure there are other things, so please add them to the list and I 
will summarize them on a wiki page.

A lot of this stuff is researching and setting up a system and 
infrastructure to support it. After that we need to maintain it as we 
make changes to the code, but this should be minimal incremental effort 
once the infrastructure is in place.

If you want to contribute, please let us know. In the meanwhile, we will 
try to move forward with this. I know both Daniel and I are busy working 
on the jobs that pay the bills, but I think we can both find enough time 
to get some of this organized and support anyone that has some time to 
contribute.

Best regards,
   -Steve