[ilugc] chennailug.org went down or hacked?

[Kenneth Gonsalves]

On Tuesday 14 Jul 2009 8:49:14 am Vamsee Kanakala wrote:
> Really? Are you sure? What exactly stops any one in this community from
> checking out the current site from an svn repo and making changes,
> committing the changes, and asking somebody to deploy it? This is how all
> open source projects work. I don't see why it wouldn't work with a highly
> capable audience of this list.

this is the key point. We are an open source community. Everything we do must 
be open. MUST BE OPEN. Which means our website code must be publicly 
available. It also means that suggestions for improvements, wish lists and bug 
reports must be systematically made and archived. And it takes max 10 minutes 
to set up a repo, wiki and bugtracking system for this. There are hundreds of 
members of this list who are capable of doing this. It gives us a very bad 
name to see the work being done in a proprietary manner. I agree that not many 
people turn up when there is field work to be done - often due to time 
constraints, distance etc. But this is not field work. Let this be done as a 
matter of urgency.

further, if we have such a repo, change of hands of the person deploying it is 
dead easy. If one site gets b0rked, setting up another is easy. We will never 
be in the position where we say: 'I do not know who was running the previous 
site and where the code is'

from what I have seen of the discussion it does not appear that the present 
site is under version control at all - it looks like it is being tinkered with 
in production. This is not the way to deploy a site. It's ok if some college 
kids do a site with frontpage - but not ILUGC site.

the other thing of serious concern is i18n. Internationalisation of an 
application has to be done from the very beginning, otherwise it is a tedious 
job to go back and mark all the strings for translation. Coders tend to be a 
little lax and often do not mark the strings - opening the code will help us 
to check for that. btw, is the tamil translation of drupal strings done?
-- 
regards
kg
http://lawgon.livejournal.com