Project Status Wiki?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Mon, 2012-04-30 at 11:59 -0400, Charles Tryon wrote:
> Hi Brad!
> 
> Well, my intent is to get people thinking about this, not to say you have
> to do it one particular way or another, so I'm open to lots of different
> ideas!

> After doing software development for 30+ years, I've come to realize that,
> while most developers (myself included) view "project management" as
> useless overhead getting in the way of their REAL WORK, it
> is unfortunately, the magical thing which transforms a developer's
> "interesting project" into something that people can actually use in a real
> production environment.  The encouraging thing is that we're seeing more
> and more people (non-developers) on this list who really ARE trying to use
> Samba4 to do useful work!  The tricky part is finding a way to do "Project
> Management" (read: "communication", not "control"!) in a way that benefits
> people who are trying to USE the software, without getting in the way of
> the people trying to BUILD the software.

I do very much appreciate you and others stepping into this void.  It is
a most useful thing to do, because in this structure, you can bring
efficiencies and even (we can hope) new blood!

A while back, Matthias simply started dealing with the backlog in
bugzilla - be in writing patches, or just sorting out the fixed bugs
from the unfixed or ignored (from either us or the reporter).

This made an incredible difference at the time, so I continue to applaud
such efforts.  

> You're right though that developers and administrators/users think about
> features from very different vantage points, which makes it difficult for
> developers to even know how to report "status" in a way that is meaningful
> to a network admin.  I'm just trying to figure out SOMETHING to start the
> communication.

Thanks,

>   I think that using commit messages is a good idea, as long as developers
> actually put useful content into these messages!  Unfortunately, I've spent
> too many years reading SCCS/RCS/Subversion/git commit logs that read like,
> "fixing glitches". :-(  Assuming that real, useful comments exist, do you
> map commits to features by the author, the source code module, the date,
> the commit ID?  Suggestions?

As you would see at https://gitweb.samba.org/?p=samba.git;a=shortlog we
really try not to do 'fixing glitches'.  Feel free to ask for more
detail - folks are usually glad to talk about the work they have done. 

>   Any other people interested in tracking their "important" features would
> be welcome.
> 
> 
>   (I'm working on learning my way around Git.  Any expert suggestions on
> how to get this information would be most appreciated!)

https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Using_Git_for_Samba_Development

Please feel free to ping me, I do support this effort and wish you the
best with it.  We do not have enough documentation, except for the HOWTO
(which needs a cleanup to return to being generic) and this will in some
senses start that for other parts of Samba.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org