[Server-devel] volunteer for offline Moodle

Martin Langhoff martin.langhoff at gmail.com
Sun Jul 13 12:05:49 EDT 2008


On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 5:53 PM, David Van Assche <dvanassche at gmail.com> wrote:
> So the Google Gears rpm is finished (good lesson for me on how to package
> for Fedora) and we are working on the final obstacle for Browse, which is
> finding where in God's name the chrome subdirs are supposed to go... when
> thats done, we can create the browse rpm too...

Excellent - is the srpm or the makefiles available anywhere? Might be
a good idea to post to Fedora-devel about it, it is sure to get a
review, and perhaps some help with its long-term maintenance...

>> So I have a slightly different plan :-)
>
> This is great, but we should look for an interim solution to full blown
> Offline Moodle, something we can start using soonish... But maybe what you
> outline below is an interim solution... I guess we'll know when we start
> coding...

It is. I am not sure how familiar you are with Moodle, but this is the
clearest practical plan I can think of that gives us working code ASAP
and also gives us a long-term maintainable codebase & approach.

I have been working with the goriest parts of Moodle internals for
more than 4 years, and the offline moodle problem has been in the back
of my mind for at least 2. Maybe that helps :-)


> Maybe we should talk to Moodle and make this official with them somehow?

I am in touch with the moodle.org crowd quite a bit, and they know my
offline moodle plans - in a vague outline as I have described in this
email. I weighted mentioning it on moodle.org when Tony posted, but I
rather wait until we have things a bit more organised and fleshed out.
If we can flesh out the plan above with you and Tony, and see what
time you guys can put into it, we can probably move the disucssion to
either "general developer forum" or the "offline moodle" forum.

But we need to have our plans a bit more polished :-)

> That might get some of the other projects to join our efforts.. It seems
> silly to have 3 forks of offline moodle, and from what I've seen so far the
> Gears method by far outweighs the benefits of the other methods...

The OU crowd has a product with users out there, and can't jump ship
immediately. The AIR guys may be too far down their path. I am
confident that I have a solid plan and as soon as we can get working
code done people will slowly start to play with it and eventually join
us. But it is always like that in any project - more visitbie with
FOSS but ever present - _you_ have to crack the nut, show a viable
path with working code. And only then others will follow.

My main concern is that I don't have any time to work on this for a
few months. I will be doing ancillary stuff (moodle authentication,
etc) but cannot work on this.

> Authentication is one of the first things that need looking at, since a
> Moodle user must login in order to download anything...

Not for our use case -- the user on the laptop is always the same user
on moodle, and gets auto-login. That simplifies things  - so let's not
worry about it for now. Yes, we will have to solve it, and I have a
couple of plans there.but not on the first day :-)

> Some of the first course material should probably be related on how to use
> Moodle and Offline Moodle... we could use that to create some skeleton
> courses that work both online and offline...

Don't worry - if we do something nice, the moodle crowd will help us
write that in _no time_.

> How do we split the next workload?

We should have a chat (phone, skype, irc) about this if possible.

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff


More information about the Server-devel mailing list