we need organizers

[Graham Percival]

Does anybody here feel like organizing tasks?  We have a lot of
"delayed maintenance" stuff that is going to come back and bite us
in an unpleasant manner.


1) Neil has volunteered to handle LSR -> 2.14.  Great!

2) James has offered to reclassify issues.  Great!


3) a full regression test examination: it's been about 5 years
since anybody actually looked at all the regtests.  (we've been
doing comparisons, but not looking at all 1000+ regtests)
Phil wrote a very nice web app that makes it easy to do this -- it
randomly gives you regtests, you give feedback, it makes reports,
etc... but that was back in January or February, and it went
nowhere because nobody wanted to organize getting volunteers to go
through them.

What a shame!  This web app would be perfect for a "10 minutes a
day coffee break" thing; we could easily have a dozen casual
volunteers verify the entire regtests in a month or two.  (with
each regtest being examined by at least 3 people!)


4) documenting every regtest.  IIRC the last time we (tried to)
make sure that all features in the regtests were in the main
documentation was back in the 2.11 days.  Again, the bulk of this
work is simply recruiting and organizing volunteers; we don't need
one person to volunteer to examine all 1008 regtests.

Once that job is done, it will be very easy to keep the
documentation up-to-date; we just run something like
  git diff -u -r release/2.14.0-1 -r release/2.15.11-1 \
    input/regression/

to find out what new/changed features needs updating.  But that
only works if we have a stable base to work from...


5) I'm sure there's more things.


None of this is challenging on a technical level; it's purely a
question of organization.  We need people to take responsibility
for a problem, check that they know how to do it themselves, and
then recruit+train volunteers to work on it.  We have volunteers
available; every time I ask for help on -user I end up turning a
few people away because enough people already offered to help.

Cheers,
- Graham