maillist vs. Forum and commits (and translation)

Liquibase Development
1

Hi,

i have three issues i want to discuss.

  1. I strongly recommend to stick with the dev maillist for developer issues. I dont know of a single OSS project which handles the dev communication via Forum. Its so much slower than maillists and the archiving issue is non-existant for devs normally. And if you need to find something older, you still have an archive, just not as beautiful as in a forum. But beauty is for users…

  2. Is it ok that i can commit with my newly created JIRA account into the 1.9 branch? I hope there is some quality check before you guys build a new 1.9.x because i really dont want to break a release with my first commit in case i ve missed something.

  3. I can help out translating the wiki to german if you like. What do i need in terms of accounts?

Marc

2

First the easy ones:

  1. It is fine to commit into the 1.9 branch.  I do code review every commit, especially from new committers and can easily roll back changes that cause problems.  We also have a set of unit and integration tests we run before every release.  The long term goal is to further improve our test coverage, and to take advantage of crucible on liquibase.jira.com to streamline the code review process. 

If it gets too unwieldy, we can always go back to limited committers and patches, but I am hoping that we can get this approach to work.  It lowers the bar to contributing code, makes the accepting submissions process less error prone, and gives credit to contributors better. 

  1. If you could help with translating to German, that would be great.  You only need to create an account on the site wiki to edit pages and create translations.

Then the bigger one:

  1. You are right that you get more lag with the forum than with an email list.  It is also easier to ignore a forum than emails that come to you.  There are some things I really like about the forum, however, even for devel lists. 
        a) Archives are more searchable and browsable.  This is often not as big of an issue, but there are many topics on the devel list (like your questions on adding new database support, building, etc) that new devels would like to be able to find easily.
        b) There are some functionality such as polls, splitting topics, etc. that would be useful

My hope was/is that we can find a good middle ground between the features of the forum and the speed of the mailing list.  Having topic notifications go to the mailing list helps because you still get the immediate feedback that something was posted while still keeping discussion on the forum (unless people reply to the mailing list:) ).  Unfortunately, only the first topic post gets forwarded to the mailing list, so you can’t use it fully.

There are also RSS feeds available for each forum which does have an every for every post, although I have noticed using google reader, there is an hour or so delay before it shows up. 

For the devel group, I want something that works best for:
  a) getting people answers on the code (either from finding existing answers or getting a response)
  b) keeping people who commit from time to time engaged in the project
  c) making anyone who wants to contribute to a topic feel that they can

My focus for the past few months and for the next few months is around building the liquibase community, and how the contributer community communicates is a huge part of that.  Adding the forum is an iteration toward that goal, if it does not make sense to keep it, I am not against dropping the devel forum in favor of the mailing list.  If there are other options that you think would be better, let me know.  I have toyed with the idea of an IRC channel or two as well, but I do not think the community is large enough to support that yet. 
 

Nathan

3

  1. will do the commit today. I have some gripes with the DB2 db driver vendor product name. I googled and it seems that DB2 UDB for Linux/Windows uses a “DB2/…” notation, while the iSeries DB2 driver uses “DB2 UDB for AS400”. So i modified the DB2Database to look for “DB2/” inside the driver/metadata. But this is not approved. But i need to modify DB2Database because otherwise my DB2iDatabase will never get picked up. So this could be the only issue with my commit. I asked two people with DB2 for Linux/Windows but answers are still pending.

  2. Will start the next days…

  3. lets see how it goes. I personally dont like writing this stuff in a forum. Of course polls and stuff are useful in a dev community but this is a seperate issue to me which could be handled outside of a maillist.

BTW if you want to generate a dev community, you should start making the devs visible on the homepage. Developers like publicity rewards as you know. If they spent time on something for free, its common sense to point out that they help out somewhere on the homepage.

Note: Forget IRC. You really must have a massive developer / user base to let IRC fly. But i really like that you are on the JIRA train. We use JIRA too internally in our company and we also like cruicible and Fisheye. Good idea. Do i get it right that you also use the Subversion/Jira Plugin, so committing with the JIRA Id inside the comment will do a binding between cases and commits right? Thats how we do it in our company.

Marc