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Re: dev@ to users@ communication channel

From: Karl Fogel <kfogel_at_red-bean.com>
Date: 2007-04-14 20:21:41 CEST

Miha Vitorovic <mvitorovic@nil.si> writes:
> I think that may not be enough. I think this role should not be reduced to
> the commentator of the dev@ list for the users@, but calls for a person
> that is to some extent "part" of the developer community. Someone who can
> ask questions on the dev@ list without being perceived as a pesky user who
> sticks his nose into everything. I know that user questions are not left
> unanswered on the dev@ list, but they are usually answered by the same
> persons, not by the people actually "in charge" of that feature. And the
> feeling I get on such occasions, is that the person "in charge" doesn't
> "have the time" to answer it.

That doesn't matter, as long as the answer is correct. Why would
anyone care whom the answer comes from?

> In short, I see this role as something similar to the release manager - he
> gets to say "I still need signatures from these people". I think the "PR"
> manager would be someone who has the right to say "You there, you working
> on something. Can you take 10 minutes of your time and write up an e-mail
> that explains what you're doing and why from the users perspective?" After
> that the "PR" manager takes that, asks some additional questions if
> necessary, and communicates it to the users@ list, puts it on a site
> somewhere or something like that.

Yuck -- no :-). The point of the PR manager is so that developers
*won't* get bothered with such requests.

The people working on features _already_ take the time to write up
user-friendly explanations. But it doesn't matter how often we do
this, there will always be some users who don't see these writeups.
This new manager's job would learn where the writeups are, point
people to them, and answer questions.

Take sparse-directories, for example. It's all written up in
http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/notes/sparse-directories.txt.
There's even a "Current Status" section at the end. In many, many
mails on the dev@ list, I've pointed to that document. If you were a
user-relationship manager and you were watching, you would know where
to look.

Same with merge-tracking, at http://subversion.tigris.org/merge-tracking/.

There has been writeup after writeup about true rename support.
There's no lack of information. We just need someone to keep track of
it (that's you).

> What do you (everybody) think?

I think you should give it a try, before deciding it doesn't work.

The developers are already supplying the information you need. The
result you'd like to see can be accomplished entirely by you watching
the lists and doing the right things. If you find that difficult (and
I wouldn't blame you, it *is* difficult), then you'll understand why
the developers will never be able to spend as much time on it as some
users want.

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Received on Sat Apr 14 20:22:01 2007

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