freebsd 7 release process

[Aristedes Maniatis]

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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