Re: Commit fest?

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008, Andrew Dunstan wrote:

> I can't say I find this an advance - paging through 14 pages of subject
> headers with the odd comment isn't very productive.

Bruce had said it was going to take him time to organize things better,
and instead of waiting for that to complete he was asked to just dump the
whole archive in there so other people could help. I didn't find the
formatting a problem. Many of the patches I had something to say about
were already sitting in my personal archived mailbox as well in the same
format, so I just switched to my mail reader to follow the threads better
in those cases.

> A nice wiki table with links to the discussions would be much nicer,
> IMNSHO.

Well then hurry up and take care of building that for everybody. One of
my better known catch phrases among my friends is "don't complain about
anything you're not willing to fix yourself".

I recall a moment from late in the 8.3 cycle that seems familiar here. I
went to the trouble of pushing some of the CVS commit information onto the
developer's wiki so that multiple people could help work through sorting
through it all as part of the release note building proces. But nobody
did, and Tom ended up doing the whole thing himself instead.

The lesson I walked away with is that if the person doing most of the work
isn't interested in your tool, what you and other people would like isn't
particularly relevant. While it's far from perfect, the comment thing on
these pages is a step forward, and I've spent a few hours sorting through
the parts of this I understand this week to try and help out with that.

Until someone other than Bruce and Tom is going to volunteer to do the
time consuming parts of the job, whether it would be nice to have this
information on a wiki or not doesn't matter too much. Usefully organized
content doesn't magically create itself, it takes work. I think once the
backlog is whittled down to a managable size moving to the wiki format
used to track 8.3 progress will make sense. Right now many of these
threads are not turning into patches to review, and the easiest way to
figure out which are which is to read through the discussion
thread--something a wiki wouldn't make any easier than the view Bruce is
already providing.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD