On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 09:25:45PM -0600, Colin Campbell wrote: > I'm solidly with Janek here, Graham. As it sits, a person wanting > to follow the trail of a (bug/issue/enhancement request) has to find > the thing on two separate web-sites, where developers log in despite > your comment above, using two different tracking numbers and > possibly two different descriptions. The curious person also has to > read -devel and -bug to be sure nothing relevant was sent mail-list > only.
Yep. I'd describe it as three websites, though -- the email archives being the third. And even then, the discussion may very well span multiple email lists (start off on -user, migrate to bug-, then to -devel?). It's a royal mess. > No doubt it would be a wrench converting to a code management > system, but I firmly believe the benefits from having all relevant > material, discussions, patches and reviews, in a single place, are > immediately large, and that although there is no way to quantify it > but one can reasonably expect it, a synergy will develop where > unexpected things happen as a result of seeing a bigger picture. Any ideas on how to deal with people who only want to deal with email? Suppose that we switch to a unified issue+patch tool. Then suppose that somebody posts patch, an automatic email is sent out, and I quickly reply to that email saying "nice idea, but it won't work because XYZ, but you can work around that by adding this one line of code ABC" because I need to go teach a class in 2 minutes, but I knew I had the solution right away and wanted to let the person know. What happens to that email? - somebody manually adds is to the unified tool? - somebody tells me to screw off for not "playing ball"? - everybody pretends that email didn't exist, and spends hours trying to figure out ABC? For better or worse, the open-source community has a huge history of development via email. We simply cannot survive if we break with that. Now, some tools will automatically accept replies via email; we've had mixed success doing that with tracker issues and Rietveld discussions. If somebody can step forward with a tool that provides flawless support for email, I guess it's worth discussing. My vague recollection is that the google project tools have easy support for email as long as everybody is using google accounts. Not just "have access to a google account", but "is using the email address associated with their google account". I suppose it's not so much of a big step to require this for lilypond developers -- but on the other hand, I'm concerned that we're getting too far away from the ideals of a GNU project. I generally don't have a lot of patience for the more hard-line FSF people, but even I'm getting worried about the direction we're heading. Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
