[Alexandria-list] Documenting Alexandria

[Joseph Method]

Liam,

Are you kidding? We need all the help we can get! :)

> I'm Liam Davison, and I wrote the original documentation for
> Alexandria, and I would be happy to help out with testing and
> documentation again. I've downloaded SVN and had a quick run - didn't
> go very well, I'm afraid - but I'll run proper tests over the weekend.

Testing is so important at this point, especially if you can help
convert bug reports into unit tests. Actually, I've been a bit quiet
lately because I've been playing with/learning about Rake and RSpec.
I'll write a full post about these later, but I wonder if you have any
experience with these tools?

> I'm glad that Alexandria has been resurrected, and kudos to the
> designer of the new website - looks good.

Thanks. The next step is to get a working wiki and a blog planet. If
you're interested in altering any of the actual text on the site, I
can give you a login to the Radiant system (that goes for anyone else,
of course). I'm thinking of using Retroactiva for the wiki, with an
option of using that for tickets/repository stuff later (needs some
consideration re: Rubyforge presence).

> I used to develop a parallel fork of Alexandria, called Carnegie,
> which I hoped would be useful for publishers maintaining catalogues of
> their own books. It was designed to have comprehensive support for
> ONIX, but didn't get very far. Alexandria's current ONIX export
> function produces files which aren't valid because Alexandria doesn't
> store enough information.

You should see Marco Constantini's post (referred to in the "Marco's
Vision" thread) about separating the various components of Alexandria.
Carnegie would be within the scope of Alexandria Projects, if you
wanted to resurrect it and place it under that umbrella(cool name,
btw, I live in Pittsburgh).

> If anyone would like to know more about Carnegie or ONIX support in
> Alexandria, drop me an email.

Marco Constantini has done some work on improving the ONIX support.
BTW, what were the biggest issues with running from the svn?
-- 
-J. Method