Organisation

Working with Git is... complex.

A really good guide on branching is available here: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/ In my case, I wanted to branch a previous version of my code to launch a parallel branch for bug-fixing of the previous release. I used the Chamilo code repository on google code.

Those of you watching closely the Dokeos code will have noticed... I stopped contributing to the project in December 2009, along with my team of 12 and all of our fellow community members. The only changes we sent were actually customer requirements, so no way to avoid that. But that's it. I officially stopped working with Dokeos on January 1st, 2010. As many huge actors in the open-source (MySQL/MariaDB, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, ...) and PHP development world at the end of 2009, it was time for a big change.

Note: I'm talking about free, public, open-source software here, not that hacked open-source stuff that you just provide to your customers. Mostly, the difficulty of managing an open-source business is that there are even less good management people that know what free open-source software is than there are good management people at all. And then when an open-source business in launched, it's most probably because the initial entrepreneur knew what open-source software was and thought he had a good idea on how to make business with it.

I don't know what's happened but August was supposed to be a quiet month and then all of a sudden dozens of work requests appeared and we have been completely drowned with work.

[caption id="attachment_548" align="aligncenter" width="149" caption="DOKUDA - Dokeos Users Days America"]

Today I went to the Escuelab in the centre of Lima to meet with Alberto, Kike Mayorga and Kiko Contreras. My visit was apparently taken with great interest and they've video-interviewed me for some time to talk about DOKUDA and my projects with Dokeos and the OLPC (now updated to Chamilo and the OLPC). Apparently, the idea to have Dokeos/Chamilo run on one of the XO itself was never thought about, and that seemed to be an announcement of uttermost interest to them that this *could* be done at all.

Ana Elena, from Uruguay, sent this video to Dokeos Latinoamérica the other day. We first discussed in a blog comment on the Dokeos Latinoamérica's blog, then I wanted to know more about their project, so this was their answer... [youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bjkEUjA5gM] Cute, isn't it?

Regular readers will start to think that I like giving delays that I cannot respect. To be on the *safe* side, I'd like them to know that customers always have priority over the software, which gives me a good excuse to be late on delivering the public version of Dokeos 1.8.6 :-) Alternatively, customers are the ones investing into Dokeos and allowing us to develop a great product. So thank you, dear customer.

We've been stuck all week on SCORM problems (time tracking).