Mark Smith's Journal

This weekend I have made some darn good progress on the WTF project.  The system of splitting up what LJ code calls "friends" into two groups: people you watch and people you trust.  This split enables you to do some pretty neat things with managing your usage of the site.

Of course, it's a hell of a project.  The diff at present is 4,568 lines of code.  Granted, a lot of that is moving things around, but each bit of code has had to be altered and updated to fit with the new model.  In many cases policy decisions have to be made about whether to convert existing friends functionality to use your "watch list" or your "trust list."

Anyway, I'm mostly posting now to see if posting works.  Time to crash.

Setup Perlbal on the staging server so that we can support user subdomains properly.  Trying to do it all through Apache ReverseProxy directives didn't look to be a very exciting project so I just bit the bullet and put it together.

Wanted to ramble just a bit about the different repositories we've setup.  Those of you who are familiar with how LiveJournal does things will be right at home, but I've chosen terminology that is more in line with how the open source community works.  You will see these designations from place to place, and it will be useful to keep them clear in your head.

dw-free (like the 'livejournal' repository) contains code that is licensed under the GPL and can be freely used, modified, and redistributed under the terms of that license.

dw-nonfree (like the 'ljcom' repository) is the stuff that makes us unique.  Themes, graphics, styles, and any glue code that we can't license under the GPL.  These resources aren't publicly available - you can look at them, but please don't steal them!

dw-private (like the 'ljcomint' repository) is internal configuration that isn't available for you to see.  It's just used for us to run the site and configure our servers without publishing things like passwords and the like.

That's basically it.  The big difference between us and LJ here is that, as directed by our Guiding Principles, we will be publishing all features and fixes in the dw-free repository for anybody to have and use.  Open Source at work!