[Aiml-programr-developers] Items for the next release

[mauro at cicio.org]

The following in in brainstorming mode.

= RAKE
=====
Nicholas, time ago, has suggested, among other things, to offer a rake
interface to the tests.
Even if the current ./bin/test is fine to me for the moment, I agree
in saying that a rake would be much better choice considering that the
amount of tests should be growing and we might want to group them in
different orders.
Still, I think that it would be better not to create unnecessary
dependencies for our users.
My opinion: yes to rake for the developer tasks, no user tasks rake based.
What do you think?
If you agree, I would put rake in the todo list with lower priority
than, say, actually begin writing the tests.

= TEST SET
========
The supported features so far should be the ones in
http://projects.dottorsi.com/ki/programr/pages/Features
It might be that the list is not 100% up-to-date.
I think that at the moment the one that knows the most of AIML among
us is Nicholas, so I believe that he is the best fit to select an
appropriate test set (of course if Nicholas likes the idea to have
also this task).
Do you have THE list of tests that we have to pass in order to
consider programR compliant to the AIML standards? If you do, then I
would consider as one of the highest priority tasks to have this list
in our todo (on task per each item of the list).

= GRAPHMASTER OR NOT GRAPHMASTER?
==========================
On the "kernel" side, I have proposed to begin from the GRAPHMASTER.
It should have some basic tests and it should be well understood
before proceeding. We have to know how it works in order to understand
how it can be improved to support all the AIML tags which are not yet
supported.
In a chat with Ben, it came out that this could be an interesting
starting point for him as well.

= OTHERS
=======
Like the Agile Developers say, we either have
A - a fixed time frame and we do as much as we can
or
B - a fixed amount of features and we do them as soon as we can

Just as a discussion base, I propose to work with B with the following features:
- solid test/verification of the current supported TAGS
- improved felxibility of the kernel
- standardization of the delivery package (gem?)

It is probably worh to repeat it: I am 100% in brainstorming mode.

Ciao,
Mauro