[Libreoffice-qa] TDF Grant Request/Proposal: LibreOffice project dashboard/"All about LibreOffice"

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi all, Hi TDF treasurers,

The Document Foundation has a grant request page for some time now:

 http://www.documentfoundation.org/grant-request/

to allow members of the Docuemnt Foundation to actively make suggestions on
projects and efforts that should be funded to bring LibreOffice forward.

The Board of the Document Foundation did of course collect and approve projects
for LibreOffice before, but going ahead we will try to make public as much
proposals for funding as possible even before approval for transparency.

One of the older preexisting proposals still under consideration is a Dashboard
for the LibreOffice project that shows what is going on in all parts of the
project.

I have tried to fill this proposal with life by bringing it in the form
expected by the grant-proposals page. See below for the full text of the
proposal. Along with this mail, I have send this grant request to
treasurer at documentfoundation.org as suggested on the grant-request webpage.

If you are member of TDF supporting this project, think it should be funded and
most importantly want to help out in either overseeing the tender or otherwise
getting it executed, please make yourself heard: Your help will be appreciated.

Note as of now, this is just a _proposal_ and a draft: It hasnt been approved
by the Board to receive any funding yet. However, given the vast amount of
regular data going towards LibreOffice contributors (in development alone:
tinderbox status, gerrit submissions, cppcheck updates, coverity updates, lcov
updates to name a few) personally I think this is getting more important every
day. The Board of the Document Foundation will have to weight its impact
against a lot of other proposals -- many of them excellent -- in the next
'budgeting round'.

Best,

Bjoern



Grant request/proposal follows below:

== grant details ==

Grant Proposal:
Creating a LibreOffice community and developer dashboard ("All about
LibreOffice")

a cost estimate has been shared with the Board of the Document Foundation
ini private for budget approval and reservation of funds

Grant objective:
Create a webpage showing latest activity, summaries and trends of the
LibreOffice project in all areas: development, qa, user-to-user support etc.
The webpage should be easily extensible for developers providing scripts
analysing current and historic data from various project infrastructure.

Grant size: to be tendered

Grant beneficiaries: tender contractor

Grant follow-up: Frameworks, languages and tools used should be popular and
widely used to allow the result to be community maintained and sustained after
initial development. Extensibility should allow developers to refine the
dashboard without deep insight in the used frameworks and tools. Blog posts
should advertize the dashboard to the LibreOffice community and invite
contributions.

=== User stories ===

As a LibreOffice community member, I want to be able to find out about the
latest events and actions happening in the project today presented on a
webpage. Updates do not need to be real-time, but delays should not be bigger
than 1-2 hours.

As a LibreOffice community member, I want to be able to find out about the
latest events and actions happening in the project since my last visit
presented as a newsfeed (RSS/Atom) for my reader.

As a LibreOffice community member, I want to be able to create a newsfeed that
filters for interest of specific interest for me.

As a LibreOffice community member, I want to be able to query filtered on if an
event creates or resolves an action item for a specific subproject. Here are
some examples based on Bugzilla: regression filed would be qa-task-created (need
confirmation/triage), regression triaged/moved to NEW (qa-task-resolved,
dev-task-created), regression fixed (dev-task-resolved).

As a designer, I want to be able to improve layout and looks of the dashboard
with just basic knowledge on coding.

As a designer, I want to be able to create subpages that present filtered
information of interest to a specific subproject e.g. events and actions of
interest for development, of interest for QA etc.

As a programmer, I want to be able to feed events and actions happening on any
system of the project to be displayed to the system simply by adding a script
generating a RSS/Atom newsfeed to an existing repository using only existing
credentials (gerrit account). At least all common *nix script languages
(Python, Perl, Ruby, PHO) should be supported, even C/C++/Haskell/Ocaml should
be possible unless there are overwhelming troubles. 

As a programmer, I want to be able supply summaries and aggregate data by
querying for existing events in the system and simply parsing a RSS/Atom
newsfeed. I want to be able to send these summaries as an event just like others.

As a programmer, I want to associate events send to the system with tags
because that allows to query for specific types of events either for summaries
or for presentation on subproject pages.

As a programmer, I want to be able to publish plain text updates for display in
the webpages/feeds.

As a programmer, I want to be able to publish images/charts for display in
the webpages/feeds.

As a programmer, I want to be able query for and read the historic data in the
system to analyse trends.

As a sysadmin, I want to be able to (re-)deploy the system with SALT only and be
provided with whatever (hopefully minimal) documentation is needed for that.

== suggested implementation ==

=== languages, toolkits and frameworks ===

Used code and tools should be open source. For the creation of the frontend
(website, feeds) a lean web framework like Django or CodeIgniter should be used
to prevent reinventing the wheel. However, the use of a full-blown CMS should
be avoided. Both the language and the framework should have a reasonable wide
community supporting it (e.g. Top10 at
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html) and more
popular that most of the competition at http://www.alternative.to/. The Backend
DBMS is recommended to be PostgreSQL as TDF already deploys that.

=== suggested setup ===

This is an example setup to perform the task,
improvements/modifications/additions are welcome, if they provide a superior
outlook on reaching the above goals.

=== Website and Feeds ===

Website and Feeds will be delivered by a small application based on a lean web
framework presenting the data out of the backend database. The application
layer should really be thin -- it should essentially only present the database
as as good-looking webpage and well-formed feeds. A cronjob running on this
machine will fetch a set of RSS/atom feeds and import them into the database.

=== Developer area ===

The developer area should be a git repository containing scripts
(Python/Perl/Ruby/PHP/whatever) generating RSS/Atom-Feeds. These will be
triggered to be run in regular intervals (say every 5 minutes) and their output
will be published for the database cronjob to pick up. Same for scripts
creating images/charts. Ideally, the developer area regularly polls the hosted
repository on e.g. gerrit for updates, thus adding new events/actions/summaries
to the database (and thus the websites which present a view on the database) should
simply be pushing a script to a repo on gerrit.
Additionally there should be an directory that can be read from the scripts,
but isnt part of the repository to store auth tokens/credentials for scripts to
access their source systems (e.g. bugzilla, askbot, git, etc.) if needed.