This gets a little bit longish, but I do talk about a couple of
minor changes in the way things are being done eventually -
changes that I think might help. Please read this remembering that my
perspective is that of a jBoss user and advocate who has been unable to
contribute much to this point due to other requirements on my time. I 
personally approach contributions to an effort such as this pretty much as
I outline.

On Sun, 4 Feb 2001, Rickard [iso-8859-1] �berg wrote:

> Jason Thomas wrote:
> > Then again maybe some of that 95% quit trying to help because their
> > ideas are made fun of.
> 
> I said that the design of the system was most excellent, just not
> appropriate in this context. Anything else is your own interpretation.
Your exact quote was "Excellent design of a silly control system"
How was Jason supposed to interpret the word 'silly', other than as a
flame? I'm not saying that it was neccesarily your intent to come off this
way, but it's probably how most of us would have interpreted your
statement (It's how I interpreted it, at any rate).

That's not to say that the proposed system didn't fill me with a certain
feeling of distaste: the notion of 'designers' throwing 'detailed design
documents' over the wall in an open source project gave me the willies: I
like open source because that doesn't happen, because it's assumed the an
individual programmer will perform detailed design. It's true that someone
more experienced might encourage modifications to this design, but that's
what this mailing list is for. This also allows all parties involved
(including lurkers) to learn constantly. IMHO, if you don't have a desire
to constantly learn, you shouldn't be in this field.

There have been some problems on jboss-dev: dropped patches are hideous,
and a lack of responses to someone saying "OK, I want to do this, someone
point me in a direction." is close behind. Mark made the excellent point
that it will not scale if he must reply to all of the "I want to
help" requests (although I think it was, well, 'silly' that he felt he had
to point that out 8^}) - of course it won't scale! and I hope that no-one
was expecting a monarchy here. hackers make really poor serfs). My
proposed Threads ('Lightweight Processes') for jBoss development is:

1. Find a bug
2. (Optional) consult with jboss-dev
3. Kill it
4. Submit your patch
5. Find out what was wrong with your patch
6. Repeat 2 through 5 as neccesary

 - OR -
1. Find a feature
2. (Optional) consult with jboss-dev
3. Implement it
4. Submit your patch
5. Find out what was wrong with your patch
6. Repeat 2 through 5 as neccesary

Is this really any different that what happens now? It seems to me (as an
interested observer) that there are three things that might need to happen
at this point.

1) Step 2 will be much easier once Bugzilla is back (Or a Bugzilla
replacement 'Powered by jBoss'?) This should also allow developers to
check out bugs or features for themselves (I don't think there
should be any 'board assigned' tasks - Telkel employees might be
assigned tasks, but that's different). This might be a big change: how
many people consult bugzilla before reporting bugs? I tend not to, but
that's might just be me and my feelings about bugzilla.

2) Steps 2,4, and 5 will really only work when module/subsystem owners
commit to replying to messages within a reasonable timeframe. This doesn't
mean that other people won't discuss it (by now you've realized you'll
never shut me up 8^})) - it just seems to be needed to ensure response.

3) Note that I don't assume that every contributer is a commiter (cvs
wise) My personal opinion is that this probably isn't neccesary, that
making people submit patches has a couple of benefits (in the 'more eyes'
territory) and that anybody who really should have commit priviledge will
get it once they've buried a subsystem owner in patches 8^})

Well, that would be my .02$ (and you got a lot of text per penny, if not
much else)

> 
> regards,
>   Rickard
> 
> 

-- 
Dan Christopherson (danch) 
nVisia Technical Architect (www.nvisia.com)

Opinions expressed are mine and do not neccessarily reflect any 
position or opinion of nVISIA.

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