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Current State of ThingsAs of this writing (Summer, 2001) I find myself in the midst of an "open source coding holiday". This is something that I had been wanting to do for at least a year. Currently, the focus of my efforts has been improving the Niggle code base and the documentation. Niggle is currently a one-man show but that is not my preferred state of affairs. I would like very much for more people to get involved at different levels. After all, that is the key part of the whole "value bet" that open source is based upon. Why Niggle?Of course, there are a lot of different open source projects to get involved in. A quick look around sourceforge gives one a sense of this. One striking aspect of this is that the projects there cover not just a broad range of application domains, but also vary greatly in scale and maturity. Since it does only take a few minutes to set up a project on Sourceforge, a high percentage of them have little to show except a certain dosage of optimism and good will. On the other hand, there are extremely mature open source projects with large, active user communities. Niggle is still rather small. The code base is quite compact and is entirely focused on solving the problems it solves. I can say that, over the last six months, I have added very little extra funtionality per se. I have mostly been concerned with documenting and cleaning up the cruftier aspects. I wanted very much to get the library into a state where people could start being productive with it very quickly. Since the Niggle code base is currently so compact, it is surely much easier for somebody new to get his or her arms around it than other, more established open source projects. Specifics: things I would like to see happenDocumentation is an obsession of mine. There is the age-old parlor-game philosophical question: "If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, was there a sound?" I think the software equivalent is: "If a piece of software has a certain functionality but it is not documented anywhere, and hence, nobody knows about it, does it really exist?" Well, I guess the answer is yes in both instances. The tree does make a sound when it falls and the functionality is there. |
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Jonathan Revusky 15 July 2001