[Dev] Initial thoughts on 0.1

[Micah Dubinko]

In http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Main/UpdateNumber4 I read:

"I've been surprised at how little discussion of the 0.1 materials has
occurred in the OSAF Chandler forums."

I think the major issue is the impedence mismatch between OSAF staffers
and everybody else. I mean this in the nicest possible way. :-) It will
get better in time. 

The OSAF team have been working hard, living and breathing this code
for a while. For everybody else, it's all new (and pretty
overwhelming). We need more time to assimilate. Some of us have 9-to-5s
and only work with Chandler on nights/weekends. The IRC channel already
seems to be helping close this gap.

Some specific comments.

1) The 'Repository' parcel is actually amazingly helpful to see what's
going on under the hood. It is, though, kind of visually imposing at
first. Either there are too many things getting put as first-level
children in the tree, or there is a subtle aspect to the data model
that I'm not grasping. It also wasn't immediately obvious that the
right-hand column related 1:1 to the left-hand side.

2) Some of the parcels (like TimeClock, and I think ZaoBao) don't use
the repository at all. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just
that it would be helpful to document what's doing what, especially at
first.

3) A nice 'Hello, World' parcel would be great, though Ducky's tutorial
on the Wiki does 99% of it already.

4) A nice 'Hello, Repository' example with basic read/write to the
repository would be highly useful.

5) With the need to occasionally delete the repository files, it would
be helpful to have a basic XML import/export. I know we're not supposed
to be keeping important data in Chandler yet, but a simple
import/export, besides being a great example of repository data access,
would allow consistent test sets to be built up.

Thanks!

.micah



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