Status reports - why not regularly?

[Jonathan T. Sage]

Hello - I have to say, I really like the idea of having a status 
message, more frequnetly than the bi-monthly.  While that is a very 
useful document, I find myself very out-of-the-loop on some things that 
I would like to know about. I have a spare machine with a very stable 
net connection right now.  What i am going to do, is subsribe it to the 
commit list, and start attempting to process the list of commits, with 
messages, and send that report to me on say, a weekly basis.  From 
there, I am going to look at the information i get purly from the 
messages provided there.  My initial thoughts are :

1. a lot of the commits are going to be ports related, and therefore 
dropped immediatally.  this sort of report is handled wonderfully by dan 
@ freshports, i see no reason to duplicate what he has done

2. a lot of it will be ambigous at best, from there, i think i will 
start politely e-mailing commiters about what it does.  I think that 
given a long enough time, these e-mails will be less nessasary as the 
maintainers of this little project get to know "what's going on"

so, what do you think?  is this a good / bad start, what problems do you 
see, and who would like to help? most importantly, i do think we need to 
take the journalist approach to this, and decide who the audience is. 
developers?  experienced admins following -stable or -current? newbies?

i'm a big fan of perl, mysql is the database of choice (already installed).

thoughts appreciated, i'm ready to start by this weekend.

~j

*incedibly hungry snipping machine*


-- 
"Yesterday upon the stair I saw a man
who wasn't there, he wasn't there
again today, oh how i wish he'd go away"

Jonathan T. Sage
Lighting / Set Designer
Professional Web Design

[HTTP://theatre.msu.edu]
[sagejona at theatre.msu.edu]
[See Headers for Contact Info]
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