Whimsy is a loose collection of tools that help automate various ASF tasks or information lookup activities.
Utilize mailing lists and other ASF infrastructure to expand the development community.
These current tools are stored in svn and deployed on a virtual machine hosted by ASF infrastructure. Prime examples:
There also are a few related tools that are hosted separately. An example:
A few of these tools have become useful enough to the point where people are starting to depend on them.
Expand the pool of people who can:
The board agenda tool has been restructured, accumulated a suite of test cases, and now can be independently installed in a number of different ways: "natively" or via a Vagrant VM or via a Docker container.
The status of the remaining tools is not so rosy. In particular, the existing deployment instructions are entirely untested.
The overwhelming majority of the participants will be people with a long history at the ASF. Meritocracy will not be a problem.
The user community is fairly broad. The development community, not so much. That needs to be fixed.
At the present time, this is a single individual:
Almost self evident. These tools were developed explicitly in support of ASF needs.
As these tools are widely used, they are unlikely to become orphaned in he near future. This is more of a question of ensuring that others can pick up these tools and make changes.
N/A
The current set of initial committers work across a variety of organizations.
Historically not a problem.
Not so much with projects, per se. There definitely is a relationship with various ASF offices, in particular Secretary, Infrastructure, and Board.
Publicity is a non-goal.
Example: https://github.com/rubys/whimsy-agenda#readme
https://svn.apache.org/repos/infra/infrastructure/trunk/projects/whimsy
All the code in question is already hosted on ASF infrastructure and authored by people with ICLAs on file.
Various existing open source projects. Examples can be found at https://github.com/rubys/whimsy-agenda#readme
Currently whimsy exists as a component in the infra JIRA. I would like to propose a new JIRA project.
Sam Ruby
ASF Board. Note: this project is expected to go direct to TLP. This wiki page is intended to spark discussion that may influence that path.