2012 02_Meeting_(FOSDEM)_Discussions

A summarized report of our team meeting at FOSDEM 2012, additions are welcome.

See FOSDEM 2012 Discussions for preparation and more info.

Umbrella organization

We agreed that putting phpMyAdmin in an umbrella organisation can be beneficial :

• legal support in case of problems with trademark, domain name, licensing
• being a legal entity helps when receiving money from GSoC
• being a charity, could attract more or bigger donations

We didn't decide which umbrella organization is best for us. Michal will look into this.

4.0 and GSoC 2012

When talking about preparing for the next version of phpMyAdmin (3.6) we decided to make some big changes to the phpMyAdmin codebase (see below for details). Because of this we will prepare for 4.0.

Google announced there will be a GSoC 2012. We will make a list of proposed projects for students, as we did previous years. We will get rid of general tasks like OOP, AJAXifying, UI improvements, and replace them by more specified chunks that are needed for the changes we plan for the 4.0 release.

Roadmap for 4.0

Remove frames

Frames to separate the navi pane and the main pane will be removed and replaced by one page with the navi and main part in <div> blocks. The (re)loading of the navi and main part will be replaced by AJAX/Javascript. This means that for 4.0 only Javascript/AJAX mode will be supported.

As part of the remove frames action, the

sections will be removed as well. The current and <?php> mix will be cleaned up in the process. The output will be moved to lib/include files which can be called by either the index page or by the specific files (which can still be referenced separately).

OOP

Some parts that can be OOP'ed will be OOP'ed, but not everything. We won't go to frameworks.

Refactoring table browsing

Table browsing is used in several parts. It will be rewritten and used more consistently.

Synchronise db's

We like the feature and the interface, but it doesn't work in some case (big tables, on tables with no indexes). Rewriting the functionality can be a GSoC project. A FAQ item will be created mentioning the restrictions of the current db sync feature, until the feature is rewritten, tables with no indexes wont be fixed. Marc will notify the bug reporters of this.

Unit testing

Extending the number of unit tests is necessary. It can be a GSoC project.

Key signing

To be able to share sensitive infomation, we need a secure channel. Developer keys are at PGPDevelopers.

Move to github

To ease collaboration with the community and new/future developers, we will move our git repo's from sourceforge to github. It gives us more flexibility, mainly for branching and merging changes with master. We will continue to use sourceforge.net for our bug/feature tracker, ...

Attracting new developers

Ask a few regular contributors if they are interested in getting more involved. Rename the 'Improve' page to 'Contribute' + rearrange that page to make it more clear to future/new developers what thay can do to help.

Download options

Two discussions here :

• removing some of the compression formats we offer for release files : we will keep all formats
• languages : currently we have english and all-languages, providing seperate language files is not a good idea : too many files for too many releases, cumbersome installation if language files

Summary : no changes

Security review

We'll add a page to the wiki for developers/mentors/reviewers with pitfalls and how to avoid them (good and bad examples).

Wiki : readonly

Because of the continuous spamming, the wiki will be made readonly for the general public, with write access for developers and active enthusiasts.

Meetings