Re: How do Subversion developers stay aware of each other?

Karl Fogel wrote:

> I'd be willing to answer some questions.

Thanks very much! Based partly on what Ben Reser has already discussed,
here we go:

- Do you ever work closely on a feature or fix with another person, such
that the mailing list or the issue tracker doesn't provide the right
level of communication support? If so, what tools do you use in these
situations to coordinate your actions? IRC was mentioned earlier, and I
also see some indications that people get together face to face or on
the phone. How about 'svn edit' style commands?

- There is clearly a culture of making discussions public - does this
extend to making sure that stuff from IRC (or phone conversations, or
whatever) gets copied to the mailing list or the issue tracker? Is this
issue of public/private conversations something that people have
different opinions on?

- I'm interested in the idea that developers don't really have a 'home
base' and may work on anything that interests them at the moment - is
the code particularly loosely coupled such that this can work? Surely
there are efforts that have dependencies on other work that's also in
progress. Is there usually enough up-front discussion that these
dependencies get noticed before they become a problem?

- When issues move from the mailing list to the issue tracking system,
does all further discussion also move over as well? Is part of the
reason for the move to reduce traffic on the main dev list? Do people
treat the issue tracker as basically the same type of forum as the
mailing list (but focused on the issue)? Have you ever run into the
problem of an issue moving to the tracker, but then the conversation
about that issue was not as public as it should have been?

Thanks again for your interest; any information you can give me will be
extremely valuable.

Cheers
Carl

-- 
Carl Gutwin, Associate Professor,   Department of Computer Science
University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon SK  S7N 5A9
Tel: (306) 966-8646   Fax: (306) 966-4884        WWW: hci.usask.ca
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