Subject: time to publicly designate maintainers & checkers?
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 15:39:45 CDT
Folks,
Thomas had an excellent proposal last week which seems to have gotten lost
in traffic. [1]
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/April/1201.html
As someone who's been a longtime advocate of fostering a sense of ownership
and pride in what we do, I'd like to suggest that we seriously consider
adopting his proposal. Specifically, this would mean identifying specific
folks who'd be willing to take on some or all of the following roles:
- maintainers for each...
- platform (6+)
- locale (25++)
- file format (10++)
- cross checkers (various)
- etc.
To get the ball rolling on what the job descriptions would be, see Thomas'
note cited above. Or, for another perspective, imagine that each column in
the following matrix had a minimum of two people associated with it -- a
maintainer, and a checker:
http://www.abisource.com/ui_matrix.html
http://www.abisource.com/feature_matrix.html
http://www.abisource.com/locale_matrix.html
Of course, these documents will become a lot more useful when they're
automatically updated via:
abi/docs/status/ui_matrix.*
abi/docs/status/feature_matrix.*
abi/docs/status/locale_matrix.*
In each case, the job breakdown for the "owners" of a particular column [2]
would be as follows:
checker ... change cells from purple (or green!) to the right color, and
maintainer ... make cells green.
For example, if you look at the LaTeX column on the feature matrix, then
historically the owners there were:
checker ... Pierre Abbat
maintainer ... Joaquin
Likewise, while refitting these matrixes, Karl acted as a UI checker for
Windows and as the locale maintainer and checker for nn-NO.
bottom line
-----------
What do people think of this proposal? Do the job descriptions need to be
changed or augmented in any way?
If there aren't any major objections, I'd like to suggest that we implement
the proposal as follows, once we have rough consensus:
1. (Paul or Karl) Finish tidying up the new matrices. There's not much
work here -- mostly adding the third matrix, I think. I have to admit that
if I do this, I'll probably change back to the gaudy Tinderbox colors,
though, so anyone who really cares about this should displace me.
2. (Sam or Jesper) Get the existing matrices on the website automatically
replaced with the latest CVS versions from the source tree.
3. (maintainers and/or checkers) If you're willing to take on either role,
just edit the relevant column/row header to put your name on it. If need
be, I'm sure that any of the core developers would be happy to recruit
candidates.
How does that sound?
Paul
[1] The fact that it had a QNX-specific subject line might not have helped,
either. ;-)
[2] Note that in the case of the locale matrix, you'd be more likely to own
one or more rows rather than columns. You get the idea.
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