Looking forwards to OR08 April 1st and the Repository Challenge

Been thinking about OR08 and the Repository Challenge. Having been involved with a few code-fests in the past, I'm not too sure about the idea of throwing a load of stuff up in the air on the day and seeing which group of developers it lands on and what happens. Particularly, questions of managing the teams, build processes and code sharing all raise practical issues. In the past with code-fests this was less of a problem as usually projects were 90% their own code, and the whole build tree could be shipped around. These days, with so many projects being 5% own code, 95% reuse of other components the issues of configuration management are that much greater. And thats before we get onto required server infrastructure.

I reckon the people who are going to come out of the repository challenge are likely to be those who go with a pretty well defined goal and some infrastructure that lets developers hit the ground running working on the actual problems instead of worrying about the logistics of such an event.

Initially, the repository events api is one that interests me. Having recently finished a solr based indexing component, but having needed to hard-wire that into our lom repository component. It would have been great to be able to just subscribe the indexing service to the repository and let it run. So I'm thinking it might be worth doing a bit of pre-work on a repository events demonstrator, probably with a SOLR based indexing component as a proof of concept. Anyone interested drop me a line :).