Exactly a week ago, to the very train1, I created a Google group, a Google code project, and a blog post announcing Noda Time to the world.
In the course of the last week:
- The mailing list / group has 87 members and 789 posts (admittedly quite a few of them being "can I have a Wave account please," "yes," or "+1 for NUnit" – but lots of meaningful discussion too)
- The wiki has a good skeletal structure, and some useful topics already
- We've opted for NUnit 1.5.2 (despite the reported Mono issues – if we run into them, we'll try to help fix them)
- We've discussed many of the other "meta" issues that need sorting – continuous builds, mocking frameworks (if necessary), code signing, style checkers, build systems etc.
- We've discussed the concepts of Joda Time themselves, and made some changes to clarify the model (more on that in the next post). Fixing the concepts has removed the DateTime naming issue, which is a major relief.
- We've got a skeletal class structure in our Mercurial repository, which has now been refactored a couple of times and still isn't quite right…
- Stephen Colebourne (the driving force behind Joda Time) is on the mailing list, giving us incredibly useful insights based on his experience with Joda and JSR-310.
- I've done less work on C# in Depth and Groovy in Action than I should have, really :(
I hadn't anticipated even slightly this level of interest. I don't know whether this is because of a perceived need for Noda Time, or the attraction of working on a project which aims to give guidance for other projects, or because people just want to work on an open source project, and Noda popped up at the right time.
I'm really excited by the whole thing. I'm looking forward to the first commit where we can ask the Unix epoch what its year is in UTC (ISO calendar) and get back the answer "1970". Maybe by next week, that will be reality.
1 A date/time field which we don't plan to support by default, but one which is meaningful to me. The 17:18 from Paddington to Oxford has a lot to answer for.
You should mention we fount out that Google Wave is quite useful to coordinate this sort of thing. Once it's public, I believe from my experience in this project it's the perfect tool for some of an open source project's needs - it could replace the discussion group easily.
ReplyDeleteI think it would also be useful in 'normal' (not OSS or worldwide) projects for discussions within the team, although if you're in the same building you are bound to use it much much less.
I think you mean NUnit 2.5.2 :)
ReplyDelete