intertwingly

The last few days I've been playing Sysadmin for one of the new IBM xSeries 345's that will be used as a dedicated Gump Server.  And having a blast.

Gump is a social experiment that I started in 1999.  It's primary goal was to see if I could get people to talk to one another about versioning dependencies, backwards compatibility and integration.

Gump started out life as a shell script and ran on my machine and  developerworks.  Maintaining the shell scripts became an issue, so I wrote a front end in XSLT that translated XML descriptors to shell scripts.  The output was a bit less ugly.  I even created an icon using svg and vim.

Eventually, I learned first hand the wisdom of Sunir's corollary's.  For Gump to grow, I had to step back.  This wasn't easy for me.  But before I let go, I initated a rewrite in Python.  Nicola Ken Barozzi pitched in and in a short while we had the beginnings of a GUI.

Adam Jack picked up where we left off, and made it work.  The new output is much prettier, complete with font tags and spacer gifs (blech).

This is only one of the ways that the design has diverged from some of the principles that I had envisioned.  More notably, Adam doesn't seem to have the same fetish I have for completely being able to bootstrap the system from source, which I guess is another way of saying that he is more pragmatic.  The thoughts of Gump as a personal build tool seem to have atrophied, but look relatively easy to resurrect.

I'm now trying to figure out how to effectively reengage in development.  For now, I'm contributing to design discussions (colloquially known as RT or Random Thoughts), but I am really itching to code.

Mmmm.  Python.