What is project vitality?
In a recent Article to the Velocity Development list, the project was brandmarked as being “dead” because there seems to be not much traffic on the development list. What the original author is missing, however is the amount of traffic going through other channels like face-to-face meetings, water cooler discussions or just personal mail.
So what really describes “project vitality”? Is it the number of downloads happening? The number of hits to a web site? If a project really is stable because it is “good enough” and the active developers agree on being picky with patches, does this amount to failing project vitality?
After all, this is open source. And even under a very generous license. So if you need a feature that the code developers won’t implement, why not fork it off? Either internally or in public. Has happened before, will happen again.
apache open source velocityCodeWrestler
In the never ending saga of being anal with source code, I was always annoyed when I had to do code releases that didn’t have license files in all source files, trailing spaces, wrong license versions and all that lint that makes your source less shiny than it could be.
I was looking for tools that allow me to reformat my comments, change my licenses and all in all do that kind of formatting. Not just for one language or file type but generic. While there are a few tools floating around in the realm of the ASF, none is really as polished as I’d like them.
And I do need more finger exercises using python. So I wrote a tool that suits my needs and might be useful for you too, if you are as pedantic with source codes as I am: CodeWrestler.
(This is still sort of a “work in progress”…)
You can get CodeWrestler from its Subversion source repository
or browse the code through trac
If you find bugs or have enhancements, please put them into the CodeWrestler issue tracker.
There is also limited documentation for it at the CodeWrestler home page.
codewrestler open source pythoneyeWiki
I finally found the time to put an (internal) branch off the JSP Wiki
tree back to open source. You can get some information about eyeWiki
from
and the tree itself from subversion at
http://svn.softwareforge.de/svn/opensource/eyewiki/trunk/
This is a sort of “technology preview”, I’m not sure if this code is
really ready for production use outside a controlled environment
(i.e. knowing what you are doing. 
. However, I did some pretty deep
changes to the structure of the JSPWiki code (adding Pico, reworking
the variable evaluation process, reworking CSS skinning to name just a
few) and I’d be happy if some of this code might find its way back
into the JSPWiki main tree over time.
trac
trac. One of these applications that you see from time to time and tell yourself: “One day I will check this out”. Do it. You won’t regret it.
Written in python; very compact and easy to install. If you are on RedHat / Fedora, get ready made RPMs for trac and all dependencies from the dag repository.
- Wiki for quickdocs
- Project road maps, Project milestones
- Subversion repository browser
- Issue Ticket manager