schooltool-developers team mailing list archive

[Justas <justas@xxxxxx>]

Hi,


On 11/23/2010 06:39 PM, Tom Hoffman wrote:
> This is mostly aimed at Gediminas and Justas, but feel free to chime in.
>
> We're going to have a few technical meetings on the phone with
> Critical Links developers in Portugal.  We're going to start with a
> few emailed questions.  What do we need to ask?
>
> The basic points are:
>
> * How are they getting and using changes from us?
> * How can we get and use changes from them?
>
> We know they're using CVS and Linux from Scratch.
>
> * How are they building SchoolTool?
>
> What else -- this is for their geeks, so we can get technical.  That's
> the point.

  Here's my list.   Feel free to ignore those that are too much 
out-of-place.  I have no idea in which of Critical Links solutions 
SchoolTool is used and how, so...


Somewhat important questions, regarding SchoolTool itself:

- Which version of ST are you using?  Trunk checkout or egg?  If so - 
what is the revision or egg version?

- How do you package and deploy ST?  RPMs, DEBs?  And dependencies - 
several large "blobs" for Zope and other, or a lot of small packages?

- Which modules?  Just schooltool, or schooltool.ldap / 
schooltool.gradebook / schooltool.intervention / 
schooltool.lyceum.journal?  What are their versions?

- Which features are you using?  How did you integrate ST into your 
solution?

- In which of your solutions do you use ST?

- How exactly is ST deployed on the system?  I.e. where do you put the 
code, do you use paster to serve ST, probably some Apache rewrite rules, 
something else?

- Do you upgrade (and how often) when new versions of ST come out?  Have 
you encountered difficulties with the upgrade?



Regarding ST integration and customization:

- How is the authentification mechanism working?  How it's integrated 
with ST?  Do you use CAS, LDAP or something else?

- Are you doing batch export/import of any data?  What data do you 
synchronize with the rest of the solution?

- How is the rest of the solution communicating with ST?  Do you have 
cron jobs or something similar?

- Which parts and how much did you have to customize?  Did you change 
the data model?  Or just the views?  Any details on the customization 
are most welcome!

- Were there any features of ST you did not use because of integration 
difficulties?  Incompleteness?  Or maybe they did not suit the intended 
purpose?



Other questions:

- Is there an email server in your solution?  To what level is it 
integrated with other software?  Do you need to send emails from ST or 
after some events that happen in ST?

- Does your solution work with GSM modems (say, for sending SMS 
updates)?  If so, what software/libraries do you use?

- Do you build end-user reports (spreadsheets, word, pdf, maybe 
others)?  What file formats do you use?  What software to generate them?


Regards,
Justas