On 27/05/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: It was on the notion that the general idea of automation applied to Wikipedia was plausibly on-topic. I must say I'm quite excited by the possibilities of such things as api.php and wikipediafs for more of the same. As was noted in this thread on wikien-l, a MediaWiki-specific browser would be a fine thing - and we certainly have the back end for such a creature. - d.

There are many things that could be a good Summer of Code project. However, the limiting factor does not seem to be lack of things to do (there are at least 12 ideas on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2007 plus more at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2007/proposals ). I suspect the critical path has more to do with number of suitable student developers who are willing to participate, the number of projects that Google are prepared to sponsor, and the possibly the number of mentor developers available. In other words, it is an absolutely fantastic bonus when it happens, but the healthiest approach is probably that we need to collectively try to solve our problems for ourselves rather than expecting some external entity to help make it happen. -- All the best, Nick.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Moin, On Monday 28 May 2007 05:10:42 David Gerard wrote: Exactly. Teach them to not write their software for some system so that the result is vendor-locked in into an OS, and a platform at the same time. Trying to fix their broken software development model by using wine is counterproductive. All the best, Tels - -- Signed on Mon May 28 07:55:12 2007 with key 0x93B84C15. View my photo gallery: http://bloodgate.com/photos PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email. "In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity." -- Hunter S. Thompson

Once mono is available for .NET 2.0 this should be fixed, not? On 5/28/07, Tels <nospam-abuse(a)bloodgate.com> wrote:

Steve Bennett wrote: ِis it possible to modify awb to use any mozilla browser or it heavily depends on ie that it cannot be separated from it? if it is possible.. wouldn't it be easy to rewrite awb in platform-neutral thing like wxWidgets or GTK+ ? 10%alnokta

On 5/28/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, no, no -- I don't know why everyone has this in their heads that the Mozilla ActiveX wrapper can simply be interchanged with IE. The Mozilla component has a horribly, horribly immature DOM interface that allows you to do pretty much nothing. Additionally, it's bug-ridden as all hell, crashing frequently and without provocation. Believe me, *everyone* would rather use Mozilla in their apps, but it's simply not do-able. This is the primary set-back to porting windows-based MediaWiki clients to *nix; it's not that developers think "unix is scary," it's that much of the Linux world is quite rocky and unstable at this point, and much of the functionality offered in the way of development in Windows is completely unavailable in *nix. Instead of screaming at the Windows developers, it's likely much more productive to scream at the developers of Mono and Wine, although if you really want things to get done, you shouldn't scream but offer a hand ;). Additionally, Wine is actually a shockingly stable interface, and anyone with enough patience can get just about any Windows application to run under it. I've gotten three of my Windows tools to run under a Wine (all three of which were dependent upon IE, I might add), and I'm currently working on a way to deploy my most recent app for seamless install on Wine--we'll see how that goes. I would personally find development in the way of Windows emulators to be much more prone to success than attempts to port current software. I would also bet there are likely many ways to hack AWB to run under wine, it's just a question of if anyone has the patience to do so. -- Daniel Cannon (AmiDaniel) http://amidaniel.com cannon.danielc(a)gmail.com