freebsd 7 release process
Aristedes Maniatis
ari at ish.com.au
Mon Feb 11 05:09:16 UTC 2008
On 26/01/2008, at 1:29 AM, Ken Smith wrote:
> Yeah, sorry. I've got communication issues that run so deep at this
> point I've basically given up on "fixing it" for this release and will
> try again from scratch next release. [ Anybody wanna be a secretary?
> No pay, no benefits, and likely no praise/recognition other than me
> saying "Thanks" periodically but you'll make lots of people happy.
> Applications welcome. :-]
Although I know your question is tongue in cheek, I am sure that there
are quite a few people on the periphery (that is, not committers) who
would help where they could. The problem is largely: how can they get
involved? This touches somewhat on the other German thread in January
here. Some things which I believe might help with the communication
issues:
* more communication on public lists (even if that list has posting
rights restricted to committers in order to keep the noise down). I
assume there is communication happening behind the scenes about the
release of 7.0, but it isn't visible to enthusiastic non-committers
* increased use of the FreeBSD wiki which allows people with less than
committer rights to contribute (possibly looking at replacing the main
site with a CMS driven/wiki in the longer term which allow greater
freedom in assigning rights, simpler access to revision history and
less effort to fix a page while you are looking at it). As an example,
I created a page [1] with information about ZFS but how does such a
thing get into the official documentation?
* better/improved bug tracker which could be used to generate pages
such as the 7.0 todo list automatically, manage workflow (eg. release
engineering requirements for commit approval, or the MFC process)
Of course any change affects a large number of people and needs to
considered carefully. But I do see the above things as being very
successful at the Apache Foundation for management of an equally large
number of developers and tasks. At Apache many projects have a deeper
usage of bug tracking to generate release notes, track work remaining
to release, etc.
Cheers
Ari
[1] http://www.ish.com.au/solutions/articles/freebsdzfs
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