MC IDE - next steps

[Richard Gaskin]

With no dissenters voicing a preference that we discuss the MC IDE
elsewhere, I guess we can get down to business here.

Since the MC IDE apparently runs well with the latest Rev engine, we can
start talking about goals and the organizational structure to realize those
goals.  We can probably address specific feature requests more effectively
once we've established how things get done.

Every project needs an owner.  Not in the legal sense of property, but in
the terms of responsibility.

- Who wants to be the team leader on this?  And should the project lead be a
rotating position, maybe annually or semi-annually?

It seems reasonable to expect that the project lead would at a minimum take
care of folding contributions into a master build and making that build
available for testing from time to time.

- What other responsibilities are needed?

- Where should these builds be posted? (Scott, can we have a spot on the
metacard.com server for that?)

- How critical are tools for this task?  At a minimum it makes sense to have
some means of easily moving a substack from someone's contributed progress
build into the master.  We could go hog wild and build a complete
check-in/check-out system, but frankly I think that may be far more effort
than will ever be expended on the IDE itself, so perhaps the more effective
solution is simply clear communication with contributors, at least for now.

As for the overall goal, for myself I prefer as few changes as possible and
it seems a lot of others here feel the same.  So maybe we focus on a plugin
system first so anyone can add new goodies at ant time without complicating
the IDE itself.

We could use RevNet to distribute plugins, and I would advocate that we
continue the practice of making plugins that work well in both Rev and MC.
I have plans for a "Download and Save" option for RevNet soon anyway, so
that aspect is pretty much in the bag.

I would be happy to volunteer to manage the plugin architecture, with
feedback and approval on any specifics from the others here of course.

Another task that would be useful would be to write the glue routines that
would enable us to open the Transcript Dictionary from within MC.  Any
takers?

The plugins and Help modifications would cover most everything I'd need.
What other changes would we consider necessary to get started (as opposed to
the nice-to-haves, which could be added later)?

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge: Publish any database on any Web site
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