Moved README to reSt. Fixed .gitnore.

.gitignore

@@ -29,6 +29,9 @@ TAGS
 *.egg-info/
 dist/
 
+# Include top level distribution dir
+!/dist/
+
 # Crepo fetched them
 ext/thirdparty/js/art-widgets/
 ext/thirdparty/js/mootools-table/

README.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,179 @@
+Welcome to the repository for Hue
+=================================
+
+.. note::
+    This is the development-oriented readme. If you want to write notes for
+    end users, please put them in ``dist/README``.
+
+Hue is both a web UI for Hadoop and a framework to create interactive web
+applications.  It features a FileBrowser for accessing HDFS, JobSub and
+JobBrowser applications for submitting and viewing MapReduce jobs, a Beeswax
+application for interacting with Hive.  On top of that, the web frontend
+is mostly built from declarative widgets that require no JavaScript and are
+easy to learn.
+
+
+File Layout
+===========
+The "core" stuff is in ``desktop/core/``, whereas installable apps live in
+``apps/``.  Please place third-party dependencies in the app's ext-py/
+directory.
+
+The typical directory structure for inside an application includes:
+
+  src/
+    for Python code
+
+  conf/
+    for configuration (``.ini``) files to be installed
+
+  static/
+    for static HTML and js resources
+
+  templates/
+    for data to be put through a template engine
+
+  docs/
+    for helpful notes
+
+The python code is structured simply as
+``module/package.py``,
+where module may be "filebrowser" or "jobsub".  Because it is unlikely that
+there are going to be huge conflicts, we're going without a deep nested
+hierarchy.
+
+
+URL Layout
+==========
+``core/src/desktop/urls.py`` contains the current layout for top-level URLs.
+For the URLs within your application, you should make your own ``urls.py``
+which will be automatically rooted at ``/yourappname/`` in the global
+namespace.  See ``apps/hello/src/hello/urls.py`` for an example.
+
+
+Development Prerequisites
+===========================
+1. On your host system, you need to have the python "virtualenv" package
+   installed.
+
+2. Also, you'll need these library development packages installed on your
+   system:
+
+    Debian:
+      * gcc
+      * libldap2-dev
+      * libmysqlclient-dev
+      * libsasl2-dev
+      * libsqlite3-dev
+      * libssl-dev
+      * libxml2-dev
+      * libxslt-dev
+      * python-dev
+      * python-setuptools
+
+    CentOS:
+      * cyrus-sasl-devel
+      * gcc
+      * libxml2-devel
+      * libxslt-devel
+      * mysql
+      * mysql-devel
+      * openldap-devel
+      * openssl
+      * python-devel
+      * python-setuptools
+      * sqlite-devel
+      * python-simplejson (for the crepo tool)
+
+    MacOS (mac port):
+      * liblxml
+      * libxml2
+      * libxslt
+      * mysql5-devel
+      * simplejson (easy_install)
+      * sqlite3
+
+3. You need to have crepo installed, and preferably on your path. If it is not
+   on your path, set the environment variable ``CREPO`` to point to ``crepo.py``
+   from that distribution. You can clone crepo from
+   http://github.com/cloudera/crepo.git somewhere else on your system.
+
+
+Getting Started
+===============
+To build and get the core server running (without any helper daemons)::
+
+    $ export HADOOP_HOME=<path-to-hadoop-home>
+    $ git clone http://github.com/cloudera/hue.git
+    $ cd hue
+    $ make apps
+    $ build/env/bin/desktop runserver_plus
+
+Now Hue should be running on http://localhost:8000.
+
+
+Setting up Hadoop
+=================
+In order to start up a pseudodistributed cluster with the plugins enabled,
+run::
+
+    $ ./tools/scripts/configure-hadoop.sh all
+
+After doing so, running ``jps`` should show all the daemons running (NN, JT,
+TT, DN) and you should be able to see the web UI on http://localhost:50030/ and
+http://localhost:50070/.
+
+
+FAQ
+===
+1: What does "Exception: no app!" mean?
+    Your template has an error in it.  Check for messages from the server that
+    look like::
+
+        INFO:root:Processing exception: Unclosed tag 'if'. Looking for one of: else, endif
+
+2: What do I do if I get "There was an error launching ..."?
+    Turn on debugging by issuing ``dbug.cookie()`` in a Firebug console.
+
+
+Django Conventions
+==================
+If you need to name your urls
+(http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#naming-url-patterns)
+because there's ambiguity in the view, be sure to prefix the name
+with the application name.  The url name namespace is global.  So
+``jobsub.list`` is fine, but ``list`` is not.
+
+Hue is using Django 1.1, which supports the notion of URL namespaces:
+http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#url-namespaces.
+We have yet to move over our URLs to this construct. Brownie points for the
+developer who takes this on.
+
+
+Using and Installing Thrift
+===========================
+Right now, we check in the generated thrift code.
+To generate the code, you'll need the thrift binary.
+Compile it like so::
+
+    $ git clone http://github.com/dreiss/thrift.git
+    $ cd thrift
+    $ ./bootstrap.sh
+    $ ./configure --with-py=no --with-java=no --with-perl=no --prefix=$HOME/pub
+
+We exclude python, java, and perl because they don't like
+to install in prefix.  If you look around at configure's --help,
+there are environment variables that determine where those
+runtime bindings are installed.
+::
+
+    $ make && make install
+
+When preparing ``.thrift`` files, you can use she-bangs to generate
+the python bindings like so::
+
+    #!/usr/bin/env thrift -r --gen py:new_style -o ../../../
+
+.. note::
+    This file is in reStructuredText. You may run
+    ``rst2html README.rst > README.html`` to produce a HTML.