Hello All,
I am a new contributor to BIRT and have been following the mailing lists
(birt-dev ) and the newsgroup for a couple months now. As a developer
who is interested in contributing to BIRT, I am still trying to
understand how the birt development happens and its been a bit hard to
figure out where the discussions are happening.
For example, the build and debug instructions discussion has been going
on the newsgroup, there have been numerous posts from different people
and somehow it seems like these mails do not get much notice from the
other committers /developers on the birt-dev.
The newsgroup as it stands now, seems to get lots of user directed
questions of using BIRT. The new developers will benefit from
information on how tests are run
I think most of birt-dev seems to be just checkin mails,
I like what Susan proposed , that we as a development community would
benefit from having discussions on various topics so new contributors
(like myself) can become productive and start contributing to BIRT.
Use the power of open source, by following a more open development model :)
But if people tend to ignore birt-dev because of the checkin mails, then
it may become a problem where you may not have some people being able to
join in on the discussions on the birt-dev list.
I like the idea of the checkin mails going to a commits list only.
Anyone (even a contributor) who is interested in looking at the checkin
mails can subscribe to the checkin mail. Also, if a checkin involves an
issue that someone wants to raise, this mail can be forwarded to
birt-dev and discussion can happen on birt-dev.
I think the newsgroup is busy as is, to have discussions on build
issues, or any changes or features that developers on BIRT may be more
interested in. It seems unnecessary to have the user community to deal
with development discussions etc.
So, I like a list for the commit mails. and the birt-dev can stay as is
for the discussions like these :)
Thanks,
Sunitha.
Krishna Venkatraman wrote:
> Hello Susan,
>
> My 2 cents - the BIRT newsgroup seems to be the place for the kinds of
> interaction you
> describe on list B. Given that my vote would be to just keep it simple
> and have the
> 1 list as we do now.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Krishna
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: birt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Wenfeng Li
> Sent: Wed 1/31/2007 8:46 AM
> To: Susan Cline; birt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [birt-dev] Thoughts about the mailing lists and newsgroup
>
> Hi, Susan
>
> The birt dev mailing list has been useful to the birt committers. I
> vote for not changing it.
>
> The check in messages and daily build status messages are important
> information for contributors who want to keep up with birt development.
>
> With that said, mine is only one vote. Let's hear from other committers.
>
> wenfeng
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Susan Cline" <home4slc@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: "birt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx" <birt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: 1/30/07 5:07 PM
> Subject: Re: [birt-dev] Thoughts about the mailing lists and newsgroup
>
> Hi Wenfeng,
>
> I'm glad to hear you like the idea of additional topics/contents on
> the mailing list. However, I'm still thinking that two mailing lists
> would enable greater community involvement. Let me try to explain
> further, and add proposed mailing list names to clarify their purpose;
>
> Mailing List A: birt-commits or birt-checkins
> checkins, build status, updates, API changes, BPS announcements, wiki
> additions/change notices
> (Other than BPS announcements .. and maybe these should be moved to
> Mailing List B, it seems as though most of these types of posts are
> mostly automatically generated? Maybe this is another way to easily
> divide the content?)
>
> To re-iterate contributors, committers, and community members would
> not use this list for discussion, but as a notification of changes
> only mailing list.
>
> Mailing List B: birt-dev or birt-community
> 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.
>
> I believe one of the goals of the BIRT project is to attract, retain
> and grow the community. Also, the majority of community members are
> not interested in the contents of what I am calling the birt-commits
> mailing list.
> If someone is just starting to learn about BIRT, and wants to
> contribute, my thoughts are that they will be much more prone to be
> active in the community if they can subscribe to the birt-community
> mailing list versus the birt-commits mailing list.
>
> Although all subscribers to the existing mailing list coud create
> filters to remove the notification items, I wouldn't expect community
> members would want to do this, and I would assert that this would be
> an impediment to their engagement in discussions.
>
> I do understand that it is difficult to always get the correct type of
> post for each mailing list, however, I think the above division is
> fairly clear, and folks can always subscribe to both. Other than the
> community being confused about which list to post to are there other
> reasons for not having two mailing lists?
>
> Regards,
>
> Susan
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Wenfeng Li <wli@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: Susan Cline <home4slc@xxxxxxxxxxx>; birt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 4:14:12 PM
> Subject: RE: [birt-dev] Thoughts about the mailing lists and newsgroup
>
>
> Hi, Susan
>
> +1 for your idea of the contents that can be posted to the birt-dev
> mailing list. And it is even better if the community can
> tag/syndicate threads in the mailing list to the BIRT wiki site for
> commonly interested topics, such as how to build from head version.
>
> But I vote for having one mailing list for all those contents, since
> different user might want different subset of the content. It is
> difficult to have a division that meets everyone's need. Requiring
> user to always use the right mailing list is also not easy. Even
> with published the guideline, we still see user reporting bugs, asking
> usage questions in the birt-dev mailing list. I expect same will
> happen that the user community will not know which mailing list to use
> when they want to send a message.
>
> If you would like to avoid getting too many emails about the check in
> notice and daily build status message to the birt-dev mailing list,
> one approach is to set up a auto processing rule in your email client
> to look for all emails with "check in:" or daily build status titles,
> then move them to a folder or delete them.
>
> Regards,
>
> Wenfeng
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: birt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:birt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Susan Cline
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 2:21 PM
> To: birt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [birt-dev] Thoughts about the mailing lists and newsgroup
>
>
> 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:
>
> http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.birt/msg16235.html
>
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> birt-dev mailing list
> birt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/birt-dev
>
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