Re: [seul-edu] GPeriodic

[Georges Khaznadar <georgesk@boltz.univ-littoral.fr>]

Doug Loss writes:
 > On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Kyle Burton wrote:
 > > First, I'm wondering what SEUL's procedures are for this, and second,
 > > I'm wondering if there is anyone on this list that might be willing
 > > to take the software over.
 > > 
 > We don't have any procedures for this.  I'd like to encourage someone
 > to pick up on this, though.  Kyle has done some very nice work, and
 > Georges has made some significant contributions and posted some ideas
 > for further enhancement.  Georges, would you be interested in taking
 > GPeriodic over?  How about someone else with an interest in science
 > software for education?

There is no necessity to modify Kyle's responsibility upon
gperiodic. It's GPL software, so it can be further developped by
anyone as long as the COPYRIGHT and CREDITS files remain faithful.

I have made some developments for gperiodic because I needed them, and 
I will stop its development as soon as the result fullfills my
wishes. As gperiodic is under GPL licence, it can be modified later by 
anyone.

I recently tried to ask how to access the CVS tree in a consistent
way, because fetching a snapshot, and further posting a diff is less
handy than accessing a CVS tree via ssh, and it compels Kyle to patch
his current development version, test its validity and then commit the 
changes, which is time wasting. 

The responsibility delegation scheme found at sourceforge.net seems 
interesting : anyone can "dig his hole", grab an account. Then the leader
of a development projet can allow an identified person to access the
CVS tree. How does it work at seul ?

 > Georges, would you be interested in taking
 > GPeriodic over? 

Kyle has coordinated the infrastructure of a powerful and very tidy
software. I do not have his skill in maintaining the overall structure of
such a software. IMO he is the best leader for this project. In a
cooperative task group, the leader does not need to be disturbed each
time somebody makes a move, he has rather to analyze which way the
development is going, and take decisions when necessary, like
publishing a new stable version, dividing the development into more
branches, etc.

For now, the patches and new files for gperiodic are located at
ftp://boltz.univ-littoral.fr/pub/gperiodic

The last patch and new files tarball add the following feature :

you can access an arbitrary web page when clicking a button in the
table. By default, the web page is just a list of elements, with links 
to  undefined web pages. As soon as you modify this default page, the
new links are seeked automatically.

Students are prompted to use gperiodic, an html editor like netscape
composer and on-line or off-line resources, to build useful links for
some chemical elements. Their work can be evaluated by browsing the
html tree which they created.