Status reports - why not regularly?

[Paul Robinson]

Scott Long wrote:

> The bottleneck in this process is not that it takes too much 
> time/effort
> to put them together.  Taking all of the submissions and turning them
> into a report takes about 1-2 evenings.  There is of course a but of
> overhead spent on sending the solicitation emails and reminders, but
> it's not all that bad.  It really comes down to me being too busy to
> remember to start the process.

Would it be of any use if we helped setup a closed mailing list and cron
job, so that once every couple of months a mail just get sent out to a
pre-defined list of developers (and therefore the maintenance is in
keeping that list up to date), they send back their replies (those who
don't within a week get a reminder mail) and these get processed into a
big "draft" status report that just then gets edited by you (or somebody
else?) before you then push it up onto a web server, or send it out to
some other mailing lists?

Seems like a bit of hacking would save you a lot of time. And I'm sure
I'm not the only one who doesn't want to see the guy doing such a good
job on release engineering burning out when we might be able to provide
the tools for fixing it...

If you want, I can throw some code out over the weekend to take a look
at. It should just be a bit of perl or python - whatever postmaster is
happy pipe'ing mail to in an alias on the freebsd.org mail server
really. 

Let me know if that would help.

--
Paul