The Roster Project (introductory email forthcoming later)

[Jim Lynch <jim@laney.edu>]

$PROJECTNAME=
Roster
$PROJECTSTATUS=
Latest version in use now is roster-0.7.0.3; about to be tested is
roster-0.7.0.5, which seems to work. 

Somewhat stable. Documentation poor, but general plan to create man pages for 
each script and file format planned. Volunteers wanted to help w/ simultaneous
internal and external doc project to create documentation sufficient to allow 
use and expansion. Once this is done, volunteers wanted to help create new
server types. OOPizing is in progress. APIs in constant flux, but stablizing.
laney.edu has been using Roster for several semesters; alameda.edu for one 
semester. Vista College has expressed interest, merritt.edu is in the process
of integrating it.

Need to do:
  - Documentation!! Make it useful to someone who has downloaded the tarball
      and has no access to me.
  - generalize to multiple departments and multiple campuses, presently
      only knows about CIS dept, kludges abound in individual sites
  - come up with nice way to view the data (only way now is take master
      tab-delimited db and import into, say, a spreadsheet or db app)
  - come up with nice way to edit data (no nice way now)
  - make it useful for admins who do not program, and do not program in perl
  - error recovery systems. Presently, very few system calls are checked for
      possible error return status. All such calls must be checked, and 
      an infrastructure needs to be planned and created that will handle
      error conditions in a robust manner that makes the conditions
      recoverable and understandable at the level of the application.
      Obviously, this is a long-term goal.
  - support for more of the people involved: presently, students were and are
      the main group handled, and that has worked fine up to now. However,
      it's time to begin handling the lab assistants in an automatic way.
      The four groups of accounts I see are: faculty, admins, lab assistants
      holding varying rights and students.
$PROJECTDESCRIPTION=
Roster is a collection of perl scripts that automate some of the tasks involved
in adding students and staff to an arbitrary number of arbitrary types of 
school servers.

Features:
  - text-based database keyed by unique student ID code contains one record
      per student detailing common login name and password on all servers,
      classes taken, account status for each server.
  - teacher and class databases.
  - master student roster, printed and in tab-delimited database form.
  - individual class rosters (printed and database) emailed to teachers.
  - handles mid-semester adds and drops if upstream (school-district) download
      provides info about new or dropped students.
$PROJECTURL=
http://www.laney.edu/pub/jim/roster/
$PROJECTLEADER=
Jim Lynch
$PROJECTLEADEREMAIL=
jwl@debian.org