2012 02_Meeting_(FOSDEM)_Agenda

Topics to discuss on developer meeting at FOSDEM 2012. Attending developers are welcome to add topics.

Umbrella organization

phpMyAdmin could benefit from using some umbrella organization for financial and possible legal things.

I've found two organizations which should be acceptable for us: https://sfconservancy.org/ and https://spi-inc.org/ (Apache foundation is out of scope due to licensing restrictions).

What are benefits:

• being a 501(c)(3) charity makes donations tax deductible (probably only in the US)
• having legal entity to own domain name, possibly trade mark
• avoiding possible tax issues for member when handling big money such as GSoC

Of course this also costs something, both organizations take some percentage from received donations.

--Nijel 17:01, 19 September 2011 (CEST)

3.6 development and GSoC 2012

We could discuss the main new features or changes for 3.6 (and beyond), and which of those are appropriate for a GSoC 2012 project.

--Lem9 16:16, 12 January 2012 (CET)

Synchronize feature

Not sure about the fate of this feature. Have a look at

• https://sourceforge.net/p/phpmyadmin/bugs/3479/
• https://sourceforge.net/p/phpmyadmin/bugs/3236/
• sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3052078&group_id=23067&atid=377408

--Lem9 11:25, 16 January 2012 (CET)

Remove frames

Currently frames are still used to create the left (navi) pane and the (right) main pane. Originally, frames were introduced to be able to reload the main frame without the navi pane refreshing, for faster loading and better usability. With the introduction of AJAX the need for separate frames is not that important anymore.

--Ruleant 20:03, 16 January 2012 (CET)

Roadmap for OOP

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) in phpMyAdmin is present in some places, and it has been a topic for GSoC for a few years now, but it doesn't really get going. We could discuss if we want to go OOP with phpMyAdmin, if and what needs to be changed to do it properly and make a plan (roadmap) in which steps this can be done.

--Ruleant 20:21, 16 January 2012 (CET)

Refactoring table browsing

Currently code for displaying query results is not much reusable. It should be converted in class which would allow it's use in all places in phpMyAdmin. For example Processes or Binary log currently use separate code which should not be needed. More details are at GSoC 2011 Ideas List#Displaying query results.

--Nijel 09:52, 25 January 2012 (CET)

Keysigning

We should be able to send encrypted information to each other. To ensure this we will do small keysigning party. Everybody should come with printed out fingerprint of his PGP key and ID, or put your fingerprint here : PGPDevelopers

People with new (or not much signed) keys can also attend https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/keysigning.html

--Nijel 15:39, 17 January 2012 (CET)

Easier collaboration

Currently sf.net Git repositories do not provide much flexibility and do not ease user contributions. By using Github (what seems to best site at this) could attract more people publicly forking the code and working on new features.

--Nijel 16:04, 17 January 2012 (CET)

Attracting new developers

The multiple blogposts from Michal about the current translation status of phpMyAdmin seems to work, to get people committing translations. A similar campaign could be set up to attract new/more developers.

--Ruleant 23:28, 23 January 2012 (CET)

Download options

We currently provide 10 download options for each release. I think this is too much and we should reduce it. My suggestion: .tar.gz (preferred for Linux/UNIX), .zip (preferred on Windows), .tar.xz (best available compression).

On the other side, we could offer additional languages to download (it is enough to place mo file to right folder).

--Nijel 16:11, 17 January 2012 (CET)

Security review

Currently, we don't really have a set procedure for reviewing (new) code for security issues. As a first step we can make a list with guidelines/rules for common pitfalls like escaping variables that are displayed on a webpage, and educate all current and future developers. Every developer should keep these rules in mind when developing, but one can always make a mistake. How will we catch these mistakes? What will work best, without adding too much work to other developers?

--Ruleant 16:08, 24 January 2012 (CET)

wiki : readonly by default, modify rights on demand

The last few weeks I noticed a lot of malicious changes (spam, wrong information, ...) on the wiki. I know a wiki is supposed to be a collaboration tool for everyone, where mistakes are corrected by others but I think we can spend our time better than continuously reverting malicious changes. Could we change the settings of the wiki to grant 'update' rights on demand and not by default? The only people currently updating the wiki are developers or related to phpMyAdmin in a way.

--Ruleant 9:27, 31 January 2012 (CET)

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