[vz-dev] IRC meeting today at 9 PM CET

[Justin Otherguy]

Hi Tobias,

Am 25.03.2011 um 10:18 schrieb Tobias Paepke:

> As I don't had time to participate to the irc, will there be a
> recapitulation of the stuff which was discussed?
well - I can give a very brief (and incomplete) one. It was a rather small meeting (4 of us).

- we found out, that nothing much is missing for release 0.2.
One thing we felt could be causing some headaches is the renaming of "backend" into "middleware" (rem.: backend is simply the wrong term so we needed to correct that - the sooner the better to minimize confusion). So we decided to do it straight away: in our wiki and our code on github backend has been replaced by middleware now.

Warning:
If you run your own installation you have to re-flash your controller and correct the path from /backend/ to /middleware/, i.e.:
old:
CONF_WATCHASYNC_PATH="/backend.php/"

new:
CONF_WATCHASYNC_PATH="/middleware.php/"

- some still seem to experience stability problem with ethersex/net-io. This has been a matter of discussion for quite a while now and seems to narrow down to:
- stability of power supply (try a different model)
- lack of capacitors for the enc on the net-io board (try to add the ones, Pollin omitted)
I guess there could be something else involved - not sure that it's a software issue, though. As a very desperate last means one could set up a watchdog to reset the board every now and again. I don't like this approach at all as it even stops us from finding and removing the real problem.

- we should improve the website/"entry documentation" for beginners. An overview showing the components would surely help. I've done something like that for the slides for last year's easterhegg; so we could take that and put it into our wiki. That should help. This could also include the terms we use (frontend, middleware, ...). We need to distinguish between "implementation needs to be simplified" and "we need a better explanation for this"; both stop new users from understanding how volkszaehler works - but they are indeed very different. In every place where simplification makes sense, we should do that. In all other places we need to improve docs.

- creation of channels should be possible via a user interface; we will go for that after the release 0.2. I don't see a need for a temporary solution until then.


Regards, J.