Re: developer newsletter

[Trevor Daniels]

Graham Percival wrote Sunday, January 10, 2010 1:35 PM


> On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 09:36:05AM -0000, Trevor Daniels wrote:
> > Graham Percival wrote Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:19 AM
> >
> > > In the past few months, we've had a number of developers being
> > > surprised at some of the build system changes.
> >
> > I don't think so.  Most of the 'lesser' developers
> > don't push their more significant changes unless
> > they see a positive response from a core developer,
> > so this issue really affects only one or two people
> > who push changes even though there has been a zero
> > response.
>
> Yeah, but 80% of the time, that person is me.  And I'm doing major
> changes to the build system that could potentially screw up other
> people.  When major developers (be it John in relation to
> translation stuff, Carl about new developers, or Han-Wen and Jan
> about anything) point out problems in stuff I did a few months
> ago, it really makes me stop and re-evaluate what I'm doing.

You're doing fine.  It's inevitable that a few cliches
will occur during changes as major as those you attempt.
They can all be fixed fairly easily, thanks to git.

> I don't think that anybody would accuse me of not sending enough
> emails -- but maybe that itself is the problem.  I send perhaps
> 100 emails each week, and of those, only 1 or 2 contain really
> important proposals.  It's easy to miss the important ones, so
> perhaps we should have an alternate venue for those proposals?
>
> I mean, I don't make a proposal unless I really think it's a good
> idea, so when I don't hear any objections after a few weeks, I
> assume that there were no objections because everybody else also
> thought it was good.  But empirical evidence now shows that this
> isn't true, so I'm trying to find a way to discover these problems
> earlier.

Perhaps a special Subject: field would help, rather
than yet another list.  All it need do is make the
mail stand out from other mails, like PLEASE RESPOND.
Then copy such mails directly to those developers whose
opinion you seek, as well as sending it to the -devel
list.  (PLEASE RESPOND is a bit English; I'm sure you
can improve on it ;)

Trevor