Forum OpenACS Development: Response to Need better sign-posting in openacs.org

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Posted by Roberto Mello on
Ken, I didn't mean that the developers should not let us know what is happenning. What I was trying to say is that adding layers and layers of things that a developer must post to and report can become anti-productive.

I want things to be better, and I want people to be able to get quickly up-to-speed with what's going on, but not at the expense of transforming OpenACS in a huge bureaucratic ball. I like the KISS principle (Keep it Simple Stupid).

In the PostgreSQL project, Bruce Momjian follows the mailing list discussions, where the developers post their reports. If we can have the computer do that, great. But then it's two places the developer has to post to. Or two places to sign up for alerts.

On the TODO list issue, what happens on the PG project is that when people hit bugs or issues and ask about them in the lists, the developer familiar with that portion of the code responds to that question with something like "oh, yes. this is an issue becaus of xyz that needs to be resolved."

Momjian then adds a line or two to his TODO with a link to the relative thread on the mailing lists. This is easy on the developer (because he doesn't have to post it _again_) and easy on those that are following development, because Momjian goes and marks the issues as resolved, since the developers usually post to the list saying "I just fixed isseu xyz".

Now, applying this to the OpenACS project, what I could do (on the TODO issue) is to follow the discussions (as I do) and post the issues to the SDM with the appropriate assignment.

On the reporting issue, we could have a module to the SDM (IMHO, the appropriate place for this to go) that will keep track of reports. The developer would be able to either post directly there, or we could imply post a title and a link to a bboard message.

Thoughts?