[Freedombox-discuss] Some advice on moving Plinth forward?

[James Vasile]

On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 17:47:46 +1100, Daniel Bryan <danbryan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Not sure whether I've actually posted to the list before but I've been
> closely following FreedomBox since late 2010.
> 
> I got a chance to talk to Bdale a little at Linux Conf. Au 2012 and I
> decided to have a go at hacking on Plinth.
> 
> I'm keen to get started, and I've been discussing it with Alistair
> Davidson, who's a UX guy.
> 
> Basically we want to rapidly prototype a simple end-user service
> configuration system. Does anyone have an idea of what it'd be really good
> to get up and running? Web server? Routing? GPG / other ident. stuff?

My 0.1 list is basic router config.  We're also going to need some kind
of user/group ACL interface.  And we need a way to add friends
(identified by GPG keys) and metadata about them (e.g. petnames).

That's a big enough bite that I hesitate to add more.

> 
> We'll eventually need to have some kind of spec for how a developer can
> come along and contribute the configuration builder for a given service to
> Plinth in a standard format, but for now I think it'd be best to focus on
> usability and user experience.

Agreed.

> 
> Has anyone else been looking particularly at this stuff? I'm sort of a bit
> lost for a start, but I have spare time and I reckon I'm a pretty killer
> Python dev so if I can get some direction to push me over the edge that'd
> be great :)

I'm fairly focused on the above list as a starting point, but if you
have suggestions for other things, I'm open to them too.  There's a
visual list and you can post designs there if you want.  We could also
schedule a time to meet on IRC to hash out some stuff in real time.

Best regards,
James