On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 12:21 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote: > Donnie Berkholz wrote: > > Chris Gianelloni wrote: > >> Now, perhaps what everyone would like, instead, would be status reports > >> *where necessary* from certain projects? > >> > >> In fact, the council has been discussing asking a few projects about the > >> status on some of their tasks. The main reason for this is for > >> communications purposes. Basically, we'd just get a "Hey, where are you > >> at on $x?" response from the teams. > >> > >> I don't *want* to drown projects in bureaucracy and paperwork. I want > >> them to *accomplish* things, instead. > > > > I really like the concept of answering questions rather than giving > > arbitrary reports. The problem is, sometimes nobody outside your project > > knows the right questions to ask. > > I was thinking more about this. What if, instead of these periodic > status reports, you just send out a note when something interesting > happens? There's no point in holding it back till your monthly required > report, and it saves the trouble of the report when nothing's happening.
That's really a good idea. When I was writing, I was thinking more along the lines of things like: What's the status of bugs getting updated? What's the status of anonsvn/anoncvs? What's the status of QA's policy document? These are things that either are interesting to a large number of developers, and easier to answer once rather than 300 times, or things the council itself has asked a group to do based on one of our decisions. Of course, we could/would take ideas for things to ask, and again, all we need really is something like this (mock) answer: "Well, we have all the hardware in place and have gotten access to the systems. We've installed the OS and setup the main databases, but we're still having some issues with the virtual IP scheme, and that's slowing us down on getting this implemented." That's it. No long "report" or anything is necessary. Just a simple, short few sentences on the current status is all that's really needed for the long ongoing projects. For other things, like, xorg 7.1 going stable or KDE 3.5.5 being unmasked, a simple announcement from the team when it happens should really cover it. That isn't even necessary from most projects, as they simply do maintenance tasks which don't really need an announcement. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering Strategic Lead Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee Gentoo Foundation
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