IRC meeting notes - October 4, 2011

We had a really productive IRC meeting last night, the log has been attached to this post. Highlights:

• The code sprint at DrupalCamp Copenhagen was very productive, thanks to Claes Gyllensvärd (letharion), Camilla Krag Jensen (naxoc), Fabian Sörqvist (fabsor), Kasper Garnæs (kasperg), and Thomas Fini Hansen (Xen) for attending and helping. We got the system to the point that it can be installed and everything needed for the system work gets created. We also have the installation of default configuration in place. This paves the way for actual implementations to begin, and these were started at the camp! Very exciting.

• One of the first roadblocks we ran into at the code sprint was how to deal with information needed very early in the bootstrap process. Currently Drupal loads this information from settings.php into the $conf array, and variable_get()/set() can use this until the database and variable table are in place. Our conclusion is that we will probably have to do the same, because some information is going to be needed to even get the config and other systems up and running (like the location of the config files, database credentials, etc.) Also some systems like Domain Access require hacking into bootstrap extremely early, and this is their place to do so. For the time being we all agreed that we should just keep settings.php and $conf in order to move forward, and consider other options down the road. Fabsor and letharion are going to look into putting this together, as well as building a proper factory around the config classes, which are currently hardcoded. This was the main discussion point of the meeting.

• Another item of discussion was that the current encode() and decode() functions for XML are very hacky. The decode() one runs everything through JSON because its fast, however this limits us to some extent because it means we can't mix arrays and objects and this may not be acceptable down the road. The encode() function is one I just found on the internet which seemed to work and was reasonable sane. Neither of them acknowledges attributes, which we will need at some point down the road. I'd like for someone with some knowledge and experience with XML and PHP to look at this and come up with some more robust and flexible solutions, but I got no volunteers. This is a great place for someone with some knowledge to get involved!

• I spent a lot of time in this meeting and elsewhere answering questions about the overall architecture of the system, and what really needs to happen is a) some docs need to be written and b) at least the config.inc file needs to be thoroughly documented and commented. Anyone who wants to pick this up, let me know.

• Next steps are to to continue implementations. My goal is to have two or three implementations done before we push forward core patches, so we can work out kinks in the system. The target implementations are image styles, site information form, and field/bundle configuration. Site information form is being handled by letharion, I will probably take on image styles, and I am going to work with yched at BADCamp to figure out field and bundle implementations. However if anyone else is interested in these areas, let me know and I'm sure we can get you started. I am also planning on putting in a config system implementation of variable_get() and variable_set() as a backwards compatibility layer while we work our way through core. Letharion started this in Copenhagen, but that is when we ran into the early bootstrap issues.

• Finally, sometime soon we will be having an IRC meeting with Gabor and others to discuss how to implement multi-lingual configuration. This time has yet to be announced, but it will be a public meeting on IRC. More information as it becomes available.

I think that is it, thanks everyone for your help and participation!