[schooltool-dev] Re: General Enthusiasm and Questions for SchoolTool 2007 Release

[Brian Sutherland]

On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 04:13:10PM -0400, Tom Hoffman wrote:
>  On 5/7/07, David Welsh <rdavidw at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 3) Is CanDo becoming an integrated part of the regular SchoolTool package,
> > or will it remain its own special package???
> 
>  We're definitely not going to have CanDo using its own fork of
>  SchoolTool, as we've had in the past.
> 
>  It seems most likely that we'll have CanDo as a SchoolTool "plugin"
>  and a separate package, although it is still unclear exactly how that
>  will work.  These questions are still in flux, and we spent a lot of
>  time today discussing how they might play out.
> 
>  Basically, as I understand it, we could spend a lot of time over the
>  next few months trying to really get a clean system for separating out
>  various parts of SchoolTool as plugins on a minimal base system, but
>  then we're unlikely to actually get the user functionality we're
>  shooting for done on time.  On the other hand, it would be nice to do
>  that first since if we move parts out of core in the future the
>  application will be somewhat more painful to upgrade.
> 
>  I would be comfortable moving more of CanDo into the core, but ignas
>  and jinty better understand the technical issues.

I think there is a big difference between "core" and "default installed"
packages. Let me try some definitions:

Core:       
    The absolute minimum you need to get a SchoolTool server running
    which can be extended.

Default Installed:
    The set of things you get by default when you ask a packaging system
    "Give me SchoolTool".

So, by these definitions, CanDo is not and probably will never be
"core". But having cando installed when someone runs
"apt-get install schooltool" is definitely something that can be done in
the future.

I've seen signs that cando is going to try and build/release a cando
package that builds on top of the schooltool package rather than trying
to do everything itself. So we'll be pulling at the same wagon, rather
than different ones. That's a great first step.

-- 
Brian Sutherland