I have some thoughts and suggestions, some of which we might adopt with varying degrees of success.
1. I can see a place for structured (that is, planned) communication: conference calls, scheduled meetings on a system like Peter describes, use of something like MSN Messenger, setting up an IRC channel and everyone getting together there. But I don't think that's the problem at the moment. 2. Can we do better with CVS? Maybe...reserved checkouts is overkill but perhaps watch features are indicated. We currently get commit notifications (I suspect through loginfo, probably, rather than a watch feature), but we don't know when someone started work on a file. If we used watches, we could set things up so Karen might get notifications on 'cvs edit' for such-and-such a package, Peter might get 'cvs edit' notifications on another package that he selects, and so forth, whatever is of interest. This would at least give us notifications at the other end of the process, which is when a developer (say, Keiron) _starts_ to work on a file. This is a bandaid, though. I am just as bad as Karen when it comes to wanting to have everything just-so before I check something in. This is OK with reserved checkout systems like SourceSafe default, but it's lousy for the unreserved checkout CVS case. I would nevertheless suggest maybe trying the watch features. I would otherwise really stress the use of a single-point-of-reference file, like STATUS, but I have my doubts about that. It has not proved out so far. What would be really sweet is if we had a visual aid that supplemented cvs watch features, maybe a page on the website that you could access that would indicate that a certain developer has run 'cvs edit' on file A, for example. Maybe ViewCVS does this already, I don't know. What we lack is ownership. We've got a whack of committers and a fair-few active ones, and maybe it's now time to allocate ownership of stuff on both branches. Ownership does _not_ mean you are the only person working in that package or packages - what it means is you are the POC for work being done in that package. You are the arbiter of disputes. We could even combine this with BugZilla ownership, possibly. Comments? If folks are agreed or at least not against it I can set up what needs to be setup. Arved > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of > Karen Lease > Sent: April 27, 2002 12:20 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: line layout commit > [ SNIP ] > > At any rate, I'm certainly not averse to having some more structured > kind of communication about where to go from here be that a chat or just > some discussion on the list of where we are and where we should go. As I > mentioned, I'm going to dive in to his new stuff and study it carefully > today and tomorrow; I'll probably have some questions and remarks at > that point. [ SNIP ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
