Producing Open Source Software - A Review

I just now finished reading "Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project". It was, in a word, excellent. Really, really good. And it's available in its entirety for free online.

 

I definitely learned a lot reading this book, despite having had a couple of years' experience helping to run FlexWiki now. I was happy to see that we already follow many of his recommedations, but I also know I'll be changing a few things we do based on what I read.

 

Even setting aside the fantastic advice about how to set up the technical infrastructure, I found Mr. Fogel's insight into the culture of free/open source to be truly insightful. It's no wonder that Subversion rocks so hard with guys like this behind it.

 

If you haven't already, read this book soon.

Getting CLR Security Right - Seeing Double

This one bit me the other day. Fortunately Dominick was able to straighten me out rather quickly.

 

What I was trying to do was to update a build script to run off of a shared drive (don't ask). Of course, when running .NET code like NAnt and the other 90 tools we use in the build, you need to elevate privileges or your tools are unlikely to work with the decreased permissions they get by default when running from a network drive. That much I knew. Where I got burned was that some of our tools are compiled for .NET 1.1, and some for 2.0. Well, policy for 1.1 is completely separate from policy for 2.0. So I had to change it in both places.

 

Luckily, I didn't waste too much time on this. It helps to be willing to bother your friends. :)

It's (sort of) Alive!

Just a few minutes ago, I fired up my web browser and pointed it at the FlexWiki code I've been hacking on. To my complete amazement, the home page actually rendered! It was riddled with errors, and it crashed when I tried to edit a page, but the blasted thing actually showed me HTML that wasn't the ASP.NET error page…I practically peed myself.

 

As you may have read here before, I've been working on refactoring FlexWiki for quite a while. I started tracking my hours in October of 2005, but I really started this effort a few months before that. I generally try to work on it every day, but the realities of work and family mean it's much less often than that. Still, I see I've put in over 100 hours on it. If nothing else, that makes me feel pretty good about having "paid" for all the open source software I use. :)

 

There's a metric boatload of things to be done before FlexWiki 2.0 is ready to go, of course. I think my next few months will look something like this:

 

1. Fix the 10,000 bugs I introduced.


2. Develop a performance test suite to characterize the behavior of the application.


3. Run the test suite.


4. Analyze the results.


5. Make improvements, including the caching provider that was part of the original reason for doing this massive refactorization.


6. Goto 3 a lot of times.


7. Write the security module that got me started on this hellroad.


8. Goto 1 a lot of times.


9. Release!


10. Goto 1 a lot of times.


11. Take a break from FlexWiki. Maybe to work on FlexWikiPad. :)

 

Still, this really feels like turning a corner. Yay me.