Hi,
The BIRT web site makes it pretty clear about what the newsgroup and birt-dev mailing lists are for.
From the Community page:
The BIRT newsgroup is for users of the project to ask questions, discuss ideas and so on. Join in and get involved!
birt-dev (
archive) Development discussions about BIRT of interest to all BIRT committers. Topics include PMC meeting minutes, source code structure, CVS management, and integration among the various BIRT components.
It seems like discussion of ideas tends to get lost in the newsgroup posts. BIRT users post specific technical questions in the newsgroup, but very few discussions occur.
Also, the birt-dev mailing list is intended to be limited to information of interest to BIRT committers. This seems appropriate, but it appears that most of the posts to this mailing list are check-ins, updates or build status reports. These may be helpful to existing BIRT committers, but for new contributors who are trying to learn BIRT, not a lot of information is obtained from these posts, to actually help contributors understand how to develop in BIRT.
I was wondering if an additional mailing list could be created that would help new developers and community members to discuss ideas and share their thoughts about infrastructure suggestions. For instance, yesterday and today there has been some exchange of ideas on the organization of the wiki, with the unlikely subject line of: stored procedure in data set:
I think it would be great to get more community input on how the wiki and website are organized to increase involvement by the community, as well as increase the quality of the information, but I fear that folks won't see this discussion when it is buried in a post with that subject heading.
My thoughts are to have two mailing lists with the following purposes:
Mailing list A: checkins, build status, updates, API changes, BPS announcements, wiki additions/change notices
Mailing list B: Community and development discussions: How to build, how to debug? Suggestions / thoughts about the community - changes to the website and/or wiki, project specification proposals/submissions, PMC minutes (the entire community may be interested in these, not just committers), design discussions.
Comments? Objections? Does this make sense? Would folks be opposed to having two mailing lists?
One of the reasons I was thinking this would be helpful is just as discussions get lost in the newsgroup, discussions are lost in birt-dev with the number of check-ins and update notices.
Also, per the newsgroup discussion I cited above, I think it would be helpful if wiki additions/updates could be subscribed to by either joining Mailing List A, or by possibly adding a mechanism to the wiki itself that would allow community members to be notified of wiki changes.
By doing so the community could become more responsive / responsible for the content of the wiki, versus leaving committers to do the bulk of the work.
Regards,
Susan
