[OH-Dev] Having "Dogfooded" the buildhelper, I have some feedback

[Asheesh Laroia]

I just spent some time in the Django admin editing the Buildhelper for OpenHatch
as per https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue480 .

I spent some time modifying steps and the "Frustration handler," inserting a link 
to freenode webchat.

I want to suggest some changes to our current buildhelper plan, and see what people 
think.

Original plan
-------------

As per "We should be able to track / modify the order of steps in a buildhelper" 
<http://openhatch.org/bugs/issue479>, we planned to have a web-based editor for 
buildhelper steps. The idea of issue479 is that we write some Django forms and add 
some jQuery magic that lets people create buildhelper steps within the web app.

In the future, we were going to make it possible to import buildhelper steps as 
MediaWiki documents: http://openhatch.org/bugs/issue210

My thoughts
-----------

Since we haven't implemented issue479 yet, I was using the Django admin. There, I 
couldn't re-order steps in the Django admin.

That got me thinking: If I could see the buildhelper steps as a blob of text, then 
I would just use cut and paste within a <textarea> to move steps around. That would 
be more convenient for me than any web-based draggable mouse-driven editor.

Proposal
--------

I think we should:

1. Skip implementing a GUI, drag-and-drop-type editor, and for now, just show a giant
<textarea> on the page.

2. In the near future, we should support storing buildhelper content on the 
OpenHatch wiki

3. In the near future, we should also support sucking buildhelper text in from 
people's git/etc. repositories

This has the following advantages:

* Super-easy-to-implement edit interface

* I, for one, would enjoy using the edit interface perfectly well

What do y'all think?

Karen, especially, as the buildhelper is mostly her code so far!

(Yes, I'm willing to be the one to write the code that implements this plan.)

-- Asheesh.