visibility of release process

[Aristedes Maniatis]

On 09/12/2008, at 5:21 AM, Peter Jeremy wrote:

> What do you mean as "news source"?  Commits are inherently low level
> and it's difficult to see how a commit could be massaged into some
> sort of press release without a fair amount of meta information in
> the commit log.

Well, I use this as a way of tracking activity sometimes:

http://news.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.devel.cvs

And indeed, I notice now it has been improved recently. The commit  
messages now include full paths and diffs. Very helpful.


>> * the bug tracker. Let's just say that FreeBSD's bug tracker is  
>> fairly
>> primitive and 'target release' is not an option.
>
> Agreed.  This is an issue that comes up regularly but I don't believe
> a solution has been identified.  I suspect one of the requirements
> would be that it be FOSS

I don't understand why it should be necessarily FOSS. I believe the  
best solution should be chosen by those people who would use it most:  
the core developers. I know for a fact that many non-free providers  
would give FreeBSD a free perpetual license for the goodwill it would  
create, as for instance Atlassian do for Jira at Apache and other open  
source projects. Is it also a requirement that FreeBSD only be hosted  
on servers with FOSS bios? What about P4?

My personal wish list would be:

* rich search interface
* workflow (eg. if a critical task remains open for more than x days  
without attention, it is automatically escalated)
* svn integration (so that commit messages reference the task and vice  
versa)
* release notes and roadmap
* ease of integration with multiple front end tools, so developers can  
comment on issues from the command line or their iphone


>> I've had a look at several of the fisheye sites and am not sure what
> it would buy the Project, other than some pretty graphs.  I don't see
> how this is any more "friendly" than svn.freebsd.org.


Sure, but show me how to go to http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/ and  
see commit log per branch or any other way to see what is going on in  
a branch. Fisheye gives you that in a really clear way and it costs  
nothing to add another option for users.


Cheers

Ari Maniatis


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