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SEUL: Project Status (0724)
Hello all,
As there are been quite a few happenings "behind the scenes" (so to
speak), we (seul-leaders) though it would probably be a good idea to keep
everyone up to date on everything...
*** skip to section 4 if you want to know what ***
*** you can be doing *now* to help the project ***
1) www.seul.org!!!
We now have a domain name, seul.org, but are still in the process of
getting things all straightened out... However, the web site is up, in
its current state, and there are several documents there that you will
want to be looking through. The quick-access bar down the left has
everything so far, and the three things you want to look at are the
Project Goals, the SEUL FAQ, and the seul-project archives.
This site will be updated quite a bit in the next few weeks, but once it
quiets down a bit more there may be an e-mail service for site updates, or
a news page, or something like that.
2) Team leaders:
CyberLink: Overall project leader (cl@txcc.net)
Peter Luka: Development team leader (luka@mit.edu)
Erik Walthinsen: Web and general infrastructure (omega@aracnet.com)
Ken Duck: Documentation/help team leader (twoducks@globalserve.net)
Juhana Siren: Web site design/maintenance (jsiren@pc164178.oulu.fi)
This group meets daily to discuss the current state of events, as well as
whichever random topics come up. For the last two weeks, our meetings
have broken the 2hr mark consistently. We will likely continue to meet
daily as is possible for the life of project, though hopefully not for
2hrs every day. :)
Please note that we will be needing more team leaders as this project
fleshes out. If you believe you have the ability and the time to become
one of these team leaders, please email cl@txcc.net (Cyber) to get things
rolling.
3) Support infrastructure
We currently have two machines dedicated to the project. The first is a
machine located at MIT, which will serve as the CVS repository for the
project. The second machine, located at a Texas-based ISP (which one
hasn't been hammered out yet), will act as our web server.
CVS machine: 5x86/133, 32MB RAM, 2.1gig hd
WWW server: 486sx33, 12MB RAM, 500MB hd
The web server will hopefully be getting a new processor in the near
future, but as you can probably tell, this hardware will not hold up
beyond a certain level of load. If you have any hardware you don't need
and would like to donate to The Cause(tm), please e-mail me
(omega@aracnet.com) and I will attempt to coordinate such upgrades.
4) "What can I be doing?"
Glad you asked ;-). If you run across any software that you think might
even remotely be useful for SEUL, be it admin tools, configuration
programs, applets (CD, calc, sound, etc.), or full applications, we'd
like to compile "formal" reviews of all of them.
This is important because seul-project has generated a lot of ideas on how
things can be done over the past few months. We will definitely need to
reuse existing software in SEUL, but we'll need to know what exists and
have a broad factual basis for choosing what to work from.
A review consists of the following things:
1) A description of the software and what its intended function is
2) Apps - How does this package interact with the "user"?
Admin - How functional, configurable, and stable is this package?
3) A narative of sorts describing your experiences with said package
4) Details of your opinion of this package (no "It sucks!", plz...)
5) A recomendation (yay or nay) as to the inclusion of this package
Required information:
1) Author - that'd be you
2) Review period - just a rough idea, from X/Y/199? to X/Y/199?
3) Package name - full string
4) Version reviewed - *very* important!
5) Project home page - if any
6) Where to get a copy - official site if possible
Suggested packages to review:
dpkg, rpm, window-managers (fvwm96, enlightenment, etc.),
accessories (cd-players, calculators, sketchpad ala PaintBrush [ew!]),
*word* (all wordprocessors [not emacs!]), mnemonic, grail,
linuxconf, spreadsheets, databases (for home use, not Oracle...),
full-sized apps (StarOffice and similar, gimp, etc.),
misc chrome (xbanner, xriple, animated icons, "Recycle Bin" [ugh!])
Reviews should be sent to me, Erik Walthinsen <omega@aracnet.com>, until
such time as we have appropriate procedures in place to do things less,
er, manually. They will be added to the appropriate place in our
repository and will be available on the web within a week or so.
I will be posting a list periodically (every other day or so) of all
reviews submitted so far, just on the off chance that *everyone* wants to
review the same package. Some variety would be useful... ;-)
The next e-mail contains a template written in SEUL-doc for you to fill in
and e-mail (so I can keep my day job...).
5) SEUL-doc
The reviews should be written in a semi-custom format that we've developed
for this project. We've dubbed it (appropriately enough) SEUL-doc. It is
a relatively simple extension to normal HTML that allows us more control
for both indexing and presentation control.
The main (required) component of a SEUL-doc conformant document is the
<SEUL-HEADER></SEUL-HEADER> tag. This tag is a place to put all
information relevant to the SEUL project that doesn't necessarily go in
the document body itself. The contents of the <SEUL-HEADER> tag used
in package reviews are summarized below:
Document-Type: a general category for the document, used to define
formatting rules and how the document "behaves" in the
format. For package reviews, this field must contain
"package-review".
Title: document title, independent of <TITLE></TITLE>, to be used for
indexing in the SEUL document hierarchy. Should be "Review
of package [XXXXX]"
Description: a one-liner description of the document, or in the case of a
review, a description of the package relative to your
document.
Author: your name/e-mail, perferrable in RFC822 format.
Keywords: keywords to be used for a general search of all documents. This
should contain the words "package review", the package name, and
a few keywords relative to the package itself.
Package-Name: the name of the package you are reviewing
Version-Reviewed: which version you are reviewing, very important for
record-keeping purposes
Project-Homepage: a URL to the project home page, if there is one. If
not, simply omit the field from the <SEUL-HEADER>
section.
Package-Source: where to find a copy of the package, in source form.
There are also a few tags that can be used by the "package-review"
document-type:
<SEUL-SECTION title="" level=n>
this paired tag is used in place of <Hn></Hn> in normal HTML. This
allows us to do several things, including control the appearance of the
document, index it, create a table of contents, and do automatic section
numberings.
<S-S t="" l=N>
this is a synonym for the above tag, for document brevity.
More may be defined later, but this is all that is necessary for a package
review.
If you are interested in more details about SEUL-doc design/internals,
there are plenty. They'll be available as soon as we have our stable
web/ftp site up, but this is enough info to write reviews.
TTYAL,
Omega
SEUL project webmaster
Erik Walthinsen - Webmaster and infrastructure for SEUL __
__ / /\
/ \ omega@sequent.com Work: (503)578-5314 / / \
| | M E G A omega@aracnet.com Home: (503)281-4281 / / /\ \
_\ /_ psu12113@odin.cc.pdx.edu Majoring in CS / / /\ \ \
/ /_/__\ \ \
SEUL: Simple End-User Linux - creating a Linux distribution /________\ \ \
http://www.seul.org/ for the average home/office user \___________\/
$Id: summary.mail-0724,v 1.1 1997/07/24 19:31:26 omega Exp $
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