[Mailman-Developers] [GSoC 2012] Metrics

[George Chatzisofroniou]

Hello Stephen,


> On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 8:04 AM, George Chatzisofroniou
> <sophron at latthi.com> wrote:
>
>> I’m also thinking to rearrange the GSoC schedule a bit. I’ll start
>> writing code on the bonding period,
>
> It's up to your coding mentors, but it's generally not a good idea to
> try to move up the coding stage by too much.  Make sure you have a
> clear spec before you start coding anything, and at least a rough
> sketch of a design.  Without those two pieces, there's no standard to
> evaluate progress, or whether your code is doing the right thing.
>

As wacky mentioned i'm not planning to skip any step of the process.
The idea is to press myself a bit more now, so i can have some more
time to study later. I should have explained myself better.

>> so i can have more time during my
>> university’s exams (starting on half of June).
>
> I'd say just take the time as needed, after negotiating with your mentors.
>
>> Settings
>>
>> The Django app should handle some configuration parameters, like:
>>
>> - Maximum number of the subscribers of a mailing list the user wants
>> to be shown in the charts
>
> I don't know how feasible it would be to implement, but if you're
> willing to use AJAX, you could simply build up bar and line charts on
> the fly, adding "slices" of say 5 users at a time on the right side of
> the chart in progress.  That might be cool.  It could be set in a
> "viewport" and scrolled if it gets too big for the viewport.

Yes, AJAX can do the job here. I will implement the AJAX bar as you
described, although i think it's better to primarily have a
non-Javascript output.

>
>
>> - Month – This model will store total posts and threads for each month
>> - Year – Similar to month model, this one will store total posts and
>> threads for each year
>
> It's not clear to me why year views can't be generated as an aggregate
> of monthly data?  This would allow years to start with arbitrary
> months without too much redundancy.

Generating the year views from monthly data is some more calculations
while displaying the metrics. That's why they should be stored
somewhere.

>
>> Interface to the MM core
>>
>> The app needs to interact with the Mailman core. I think the best idea
>> is to implement a message bus that will send a notification every time
>> a message is sent (the same way an archiver works).
>
> Why not just use the iArchiver interface?
>
> I think it should be possible to have this be a standalone app serving
> the list itself, or be hosted by a particular archive, which wouldn't
> need to be the list host (or even run by the same organization).

Yes, i agree. The iArchiver should be the origin of the interface.

Thank you for your feedback,

-- 
George Chatzisofroniou
sophron.latthi.com