[hydra-dev] Hydra definition

[Kevin P. Fleming]

On 06/08/2010 12:34 PM, Marc Blanchet wrote:

> (right now, I've only saw commits related to a generic framework. (no 
> criticism intended). It looks far from what would carry a phone call. So 
> the commits do not help me neither to understand what we are trying to 
> achieve.)

This is intentional; since you weren't here for the demo, you missed
that part of the conversation, but we have been making efforts to
*avoid* defining what Hydra would become before the community team had a
chance to be involved in that process. We (Digium) have spent nearly all
of our time to this point hashing out infrastructure, licensing and
other issues that are/were necessary to address regardless of how the
toolkit ends up being used.

Near the end of the demo meeting, there were statements made by a number
of the attendees that they were interested in forming a 'steering
committee', that would provide a mechanism for the community to have a
strong voice in what would be done with the infrastructure that we've
chosen and built. John Todd is working on jump-starting that process
now, and we're still at a point where we need to see where that goes
before we start moving too quickly; it's not in anyone's best interests
for the Digium team to start defining stuff that the steering committee
later wants to change significantly... but if it turns out that the
required level of involvement in such a committee can't be met in the
short term, then we'll certainly start forging ahead and posting our
design decisions and prototypes as we produce them.

I am quite concerned that the only messages I've seen so far are of the
form "where is the definition?". We made it fairly clear in the meeting
(and presumably here as well) that we're relying on the community to
help us decide what this toolkit should become, by telling us what you
would use it for, what sorts of problems you'd like to be able to
address/solve with it, etc. A definition of the product starts with
goals and requirements, not implementation details and expected
deployment models. It's very important that the collective expertise on
this list help us determine what goals Hydra should be able to address
that Asterisk cannot, and what requirements should be placed on it (many
of which have already been determined and documented).

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
skype: kpfleming | jabber: kfleming at digium.com
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org