Natxo Asenjo wrote, On 7/4/09 7:51 AM:
hi,
My apologies for posting here, but I in the assettracker some things
remain unanswered (see
Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting. )
Is there a devel mailing list for asset tracker?
There is no mailing list dedicated to Asset Tracker that has significant
membership or traffic. A few months ago, someone posted here about starting
a list for it, but he made 2 mistakes: (1) he created the list on
yahoogroups.de, making signup confusing for people who don’t speak German,
and (2) he made no real effort at evangelizing it.
However, the author of AT (Todd Chapman) can sometimes be seen posting to
this list and to the rt-devel list regarding AT. Apparently he pays more
attention to these lists than to the Google Code site.
Are there enough
people with an interest in such a list?
Probably not. There don’t seem to be a lot of people using AT. In its
current state it does not have a lot of appeal, and I say that as someone
currently deploying it. Having worked with Todd at the company where he
created AT, I could but probably should not dissect how AT was built to be
attractive to a small pathological niche of organizations… Beyond that, I
think AT is a victim of being a minimalist tool that is implemented very
well and is dependent upon and constrained by a larger framework. People who
are not daunted by the amount and type of work required to implement a
working asset tracking system using AT are likely to have enough Perl skill
to handle a lot of their own customizations and AT itself isn’t big enough
or sloppy enough to provide much to work on. There’s not enough to it to
base a community of user/developers on which would be distinct from RT.
I should also add that in my experience working with AT at its birthplace
and seeing how it evolved there and now trying to get it deployed in a very
different environment, the most common user problem with AT is
understanding how to model their assets as very simple data objects with
links to assets of other simple types rather than having internal complexity
in the asset records themselves.
RT is the best helpdesk software out there, but I see lots of places
where the lack of some feautures (like tracking assets) get RT out
the door. This is a shame. At work I am now stuck with topdesk because
of this, and every time I have to use that piece of sh*t I nearly cry
when I think at how good and fast RT is. That is why I would like to
change this, I am no perl guru (far from that) but am willing to learn
and contribute in my own time. Are there any other people interested
in further improving assettracker?
I’m one, but I’m only a Perl hacker to the degree that I need to be. I don’t
have enough spare cycles to make anything like a commitment to advancing a
piece of freeware.