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
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Ph: 0438 840 787
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