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Re: Where is BIRT development discussed ??? Re: [birt-dev] Request forpatch review for Bugzilla 176874

Wenfeng Li wrote:
Hi, Dan

I am interested in learning how other open source projects conduct
public code reviews.  Do others use net meeting to broadcast their code
review sessions?

No, typically through comments in e-mail on the dev list or attached to the bug entry. No need to hold a session, just have people review the code and provide feedback that makes it to the list so that others can see what is expected of patches. And seeing the review comments make make them see other potential issues.

In BIRT project, the practice has been an existing committer reviews the
patches that is submitted via bugzilla.  The committer will put his/her
comments in bugzilla to indicate any changes is needed on the code and
if the patch has been accepted and checked into the project code base.
Others can also put in comments in bugzilla.

That sounds good, but these comments or any activity from bugzilla doesn't make it to the birt-dev list. So if a subscriber doesn't know about a bugzilla entry they can't know about the discussions that are happening in the bugzilla entry. For example I guess there are discussions going on in a number of bugzillas, but how would I find out about them? Other projects solve this by having all changes to bugzilla send e-mail to the developer list including the entry of a bug, assignment, comments, status updates etc. Then all that information becomes searchable through the archives.

BIRT project also has a BPS (BIRT Project Spec) process for project
level proposals in wiki.  Preliminary feature spec are added to BIRT's
wiki pages. The community can then add comments to the specification via
wiki. BIRT's Project mgmt committee will decide which BPS is scheduled
for a release based on if the project is within the scope of the project
charter and more importantly if there is a committer signs up to
complete the project within the release timeframe.  For scheduled
projects, a bugzilla is created assigned to a target milestone.  The
majority of design discussion from that point forward is done through
Bugzilla.  You can find the list of projects for each release in BIRT's
project planning page.

That's a great place, but when I go to the community page for BIRT there's no mention of that. So, like me, a potential new contributor is likely to miss that.

User community can also submit feature/enhancement request through
Bugzilla, follow up discussion will happen in the Bugzilla entry.  Small
enh on existing feature will be scheduled by committers based on their
interests and resource. Large enhancement or brand new function area
will go thru the planning process above.

Right, but how would I get notification of a new entry? Is a interested contributor meant to check bugzilla for new entries constantly?

You can also see some discussions about project structure, build
process, release schedule, release coordination messages in the birt-dev
mailing list that are of concern to the general BIRT committer
community.

As a general practice for the BIRT project, we try to follow the dev
process of the Eclipse platform project.  One reason is that they have a
proven track record of producing a successful software as well as
attracting a large user community. The other reason is that we are on
one release train now, so it is easier to synch up with similar process.

Sounds good, but it's not obvious to a reader from the community page that the majority of developer discussion is meant to happen in bugzilla.

Thanks for the answers,
Dan.



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