On 11/3/06, iain duncan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Therefore, we public readers > can only assume there must be a fair bit of dev related communication > going on *off* list. This is totally understandable given that the core > developers are all at the same company.
I can see the point, certainly, but... World Online has exactly *one* "core developer" on staff. If you want to extend that title to people who have any form of commit access it grows to two or three because of people who maintain branches. If I were going to make up a list of "core developers" I think only two or three of them even live in the same time zone as Kansas, and in several cases I'd be pulling in people who don't live on the same continent. So if we're going to talk about misconceptions, let's throw that one out right away ;) > It also makes it seem like the dev decision making > process does not involve as much discussion in the open as is normal for > an open source project with such a fast development pace. Well, I can think of a few reasons for the perception that the dev list isn't used "as much as it should be": 1. The dev list gets an awful lot of traffic from people who should be mailing django-users instead. I'm not trying to belittle anyone or any particular issue, but Django seems to get a lot more general support traffic on its dev list than other projects I've seen. That has a negative impact on the signal-to-noise ratio of the list. 2. The core developers tend to be extremely efficient at using conferences and other organized events as a way to come together and discuss/work on Django. Things which would take ages to work out on a mailing list can be resolved in a matter of hours in a conference room at PyCon or OSCon, and in fact that tends to happen a lot. Generally, when that happens people post followups publicly somewhere, though the followups often appear on blogs; I think that's an acceptable thing to do. Adrian also does a great job of posting news to the official blog when appropriate. 3. The dev list does get plenty of use; the 0.91 -> 0.95 leap included a whole lot of very long, very active threads hashing out exactly what would change and how, for example. The current hot topic is the new forms system; there were several pretty active threads where ideas were thrown out, debated, refined, etc. and now we've got Adrian submitting an implementation for review. Same for model subclassing. In other words, the dev list is used appropriately: when there's a big issue to be worked out, it pops up. 4. RIght now probably isn't a particularly good time to be looking for representative samples, because while there are two big things underway -- model subclassing and the new forms system -- the issues have largely been settled, and people are busy writing code, which then appears for public discussion. Dev threads pop up when something hits a snag; several of our core devs are like well-behaved Unix processes that only print output when something goes wrong ;) > One of Fogel's points in his book is that it is good practise to repeat > your dev conversations on the public list and even to forward ( with > permission ) private conversations on this sort of stuff so that your > public and potential future developers/testers/evangelists feel like > they have more of a clue as to what's going on what's coming up. Nobody > wants to work on a patch or contribution only to find out that somebody > else was already most of the way through a better job and just hadn't > said anything. The front page of the wiki lists the various major projects in progress, there's a page listing smaller things which need to be done (which allows folks to step up and "claim" an issue to avoid duplication), and people are very good about posting to the list or the wiki, or commenting on appropriate tickets, when they're working on something specific. I realize this means that there's no single source which has 100% of all currently available information on what's happening with Django, but I don't think there's any way around that. And I think the perception that there are lots of "secret" conversations between the developers needs to be exposed for what it is: a perception. To paraphrase a slogan from my earlier days, "there is no Django cabal". That doesn't mean the developers never talk to each other privately, just that conversations which impact Django pretty much always happen publicly, or go public quickly after they happen. The remainder of "back channel" conversations are pretty much what you'd expect from a bunch of geeks: "Hey, did you see that cool new thing?" "Yeah, let me tell you about this application I've been working on!" Etc. > I have watched that create bad blood on open source audio > projects and push away potential developers. I realize there is a trac > system in place too, but public discussion seems somewhat lacking, and > the lack has for me at least made me less likely to want to write code > for Django itself. I guess I'm wondering what exactly we're perceived as not being open about, and I'd be interested to hear examples; we've got open branches and some experimental things like Oracle/MS-SQL support going, but we've been very up-front about the fact that those can't really go forward without people stepping up to help test and debug them (I've lost track of the number of times I've said exactly that, on *both* Django lists). The new forms and the model subclassing stuff have been discussed repeatedly and at length on the dev list. And if there is a widespread perception that Django is some sort of secretive, insular circle, then hopefully we can air it out and get back to doing useful work ;) -- "May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." -- George Carlin --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
