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

On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 01:02:38AM -0600, Carl Gutwin wrote:
> I would like to interview (by email) some Subversion developers to find
> out how you stay aware of others' activities - i.e. information about
> who is on the project, who is working on what piece, who is the person
> to talk to for particular issues, who to inform when you want to make a
> particular change, and so forth.

Generally we stay aware of each other a variety of ways:

* The dev mailing list. New problems or ideas generally are discussed
here and someone speaks up and says they'll do something.

* Bugs, features, enhancements etc... then get migrated to the issue
tracker. They may get assigned to a developer. Almost always the
developer who will work on something will mark it as STARTED.

* Developers subscribe to the svn mailing list, which sends commit and
diffs for each message.

* Many developers hang out on #svn on irc.freenode.net. Issues get
discussed in realtime there. The CIA bot posts a message for every
commit.

Subversion generally does not have anyone official in charge of any
section of the code. Though there are people who normally maintain
certain sections. For instance ghudson usually does the work on
svnserve, but he's by no means "in charge" of it.

Merges and backporting is tracked in the STATUS file in the branch.
Where we vote on the changes. Anyone who gets around to merging changes
with enough votes usually does so. Often this is cordinated on IRC.

Many procedures are documented in the HACKING file in our repository.
The process of posting to the list, discussing and then putting it on
the issue tracker after the discussion is documented in the HACKING
file. While things like communicating on IRC and reading the svn list
are mostly just common sense.

The process of gaining commit access requires submitting patches which
means that you need to read the HACKING file and be around to learn the
process of how things work.

I can't say I've seen duplicated work or cross purposes happening much if
at all on this project.

> In appreciation of your time, I'll give you a $25 gift cert at Amazon.

Not really necessary.

> More information on the project is at hci.usask.ca/projects/aware.xml.
> If you are willing to answer a few questions by email, please send me a
> note at gutwin@cs.usask.ca.

I'm assuming then that you're not subscribed to the dev@ list. So I'm
CC'ing you as well.

-- 
Ben Reser <ben@reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org
"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken
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