My sense is that the approach to design in CouchDB is very bottoms
up. I applaud that and encourage it and wholeheartedly agree with
Alan Perlis about building software top down *except* the first time.
We all know that very little great software was ever built top down
designed by boxologists armed with UML diagrams. I think CouchDB is
at a key point where it needs to continue to be driven by a small
core group of dedicated passionate programmers.
Please note that I'm in no way commenting on the make up of that group.
I'm not very familiar with the ASF "process", excuse my ignorance,
but I find the IRC enormously useful and find mailing list threads
can be too unwieldy.
I guess it's because I'm not a fan of top down design. I see the code
itself as the design, and the debugging, reworking, and documenting
of the code as the construction phase.
Best regards,
Bob
Robert Dionne
Chief Bittwiddler
[email protected]
203.231.9961
On Feb 5, 2009, at 6:14 AM, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
[sending second time, as I see my first is stuck in moderation, and
I want to reply in a timely manner]
Sure, ideally.
But you can't have "everyone" together at the same time on IRC,
where at the ASF, we define "everyone" to be, well, "everyone", not
you and the 4 others on the PMC.
I see 579 people on the user list. I see 294 people on the dev
list. Just focusing on the dev list, that's 290 people, or 98.6%
of people supposedly interested in CouchDB development, that had
zero opportunity to see, review and participate in the discussion.
Further, there's now zero chance that any future project
participant can look back to understand design decision and
philosophy. No institutional memory. Your goal, besides building
a great software project, should be to get the community to the
point where you can step back and do other things w/o material
effect on the community, and that requires information like this to
be somewhere accessible.
And unlike Ted, I don't agree that a pointer to an IRC log is
sufficient to represent a "done decision", and he may not have
meant that anyway. Sure, I can see a chat starting on IRC about a
topic, but I'd hope that one person would force the move from IRC
to the mail list - and at that point, maybe posting a pointer to
the *initial* discussion log would be useful. And after that,
discussion is on the mail list.
I think IRC logs are a very poor substitute to mail traffic (and
yes, I grok the downside of async communications). A primary one
reason that they are very "in the moment" - if you are in the
conversation, it's easy to stay in, but after, when things cool and
the context of the moment isn't there, it's neigh impossible. You
also can't hit reply and quote a piece for others to see and
discuss, further broadening the discussion.
What got me engaged on this wasn't the decision itself (only
because it was a secret decision), but -like Ted - the mode of
operation. It seemed that a very dedicated, engaged and interested
community member had to privately petition the PMC for redress on a
technical decision that none of us had any awareness of, nor a
chance to review. And IMO, from a guy that probably should be a
committer and PMC member to boot!
(By the way - from my count, not all PMC members are even on the
PMC's private@ list, so I have *no clue* where project private
discussion - like new committer candidates - are even discussed....)
geir
On Feb 5, 2009, at 2:11 AM, Damien Katz wrote:
Ideally yes, but real time communication with everyone together is
damn useful.
-Damien
On Feb 5, 2009, at 2:07 AM, Ted Leung wrote:
Uh, project decisions are supposed to be made in the public
mailing lists...
Ted
On Feb 4, 2009, at 6:51 PM, Damien Katz wrote:
This decision was discussed and made on IRC.
-Damien
On Feb 4, 2009, at 9:26 PM, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
can you point me to a reference to where the PMC made this
decision?
I'm interested in the subject for it's own sake, and I'm also
interested in figuring out where decisions are made in this
project, since I didn't see this one go by on a mail list.
geir
On Feb 4, 2009, at 9:13 PM, Damien Katz wrote:
Geir, there was a decision made by the PMCs to change the
transaction model to support partitioned databases. It is a
change I am currently working on.
-Damien
On Feb 4, 2009, at 8:46 PM, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
and original question #2?
geir
On Feb 4, 2009, at 8:38 PM, Antony Blakey wrote:
On 05/02/2009, at 12:02 PM, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
1) where is this being forwarded from ?
I sent it to the PMC.
Antony Blakey
-------------
CTO, Linkuistics Pty Ltd
Ph: 0438 840 787
A Buddhist walks up to a hot-dog stand and says, "Make me
one with everything". He then pays the vendor and asks for
change. The vendor says, "Change comes from within".
