XOOPS: The light at the end...

Posted by: skalpaOn 2005/9/27 16:40:00 35777 reads
Here is the expected annoucement from the development team, describing the forthcoming changes in our organization, and what you will be able to see in the next weeks.

I must begin this text with apologies. When some among us met last spring at the time of the FOSDEM, I announced a lot of changes, I was full of projects. A little later the roadmap for XOOPS 4 was published, and then nothing: I completely disappeared during several months. It is true that this absence was as involuntary as unforeseen, and due to huge problems met in my real life... nevertheless that does not change anything for the people who are present here, and while returning at the end of August I could only note the consequences of this absence. While disappearing like that, I left this project development without leader, without global vision, and it is not just a programmer who missed. Some people tried to mitigate this lack, but without direction to follow nor real experiment, their task was found very hard, almost impossible. So, again I make a point of excusing myself. First to the people who tried to contribute to this project during this time to have left them, then to all the users who found themselves without interlocutor, without official position nor clear response to some their interrogations. Thank you for your assistance, for your patience or your support: the problems of these latest months will be soon forgotten, it is a promise I make personally. To explain in detail all that will occur in the next weeks or months would take too many pages, thus I will try to synthesize as much as possible today. The principal idea which is at the origin of the majority of the changes that you will soon see is the same one, but we will apply it to our program, to the way we work, at every possible level. To define in a few words what it consists was already made by another architect called Hans Reiser (the programmer who created ReiserFS) so I will only quote here his "Reiser's law of information economics": The expressive power of an information system is proportional not to the number of objects that get implemented for it, but instead is proportional to the number of possible effective interactions between objects in it. In normal language what does that mean ? That to communicate is more important than to act (in latine, communicare that is to say comm-unicare: how to give the one to the multiple, to the with (to share), or also what allows this with to give birth to the one). That the potential lies in the interfaces, the relations, in the protocols, and that these are the points we will focus on at first.