Developers,

I've reached a point where I cannot take the the thought of  
continuing what I consider to be rather "Archaic" practices of  
maintaining KNOWN_BUGS files in the "dspace" directory.   I consider  
these files as "always incomplete and out of date" information.  They  
introduce an overhead for developers contributing changes, commiters  
processing them and for the release manager to verify all has been  
documented properly in.  To be honest, as a maintainer of a DSpace  
instance and a developer, I never read these files, and instead  
review the work done in the Tracker, WIKI and SVN logs.

http://dspace.svn.sf.net/svnroot/dspace/branches/dspace-1_5_x/dspace/ 
KNOWN_BUGS

I would recommend a different approach for maintaining a more  
accurate reference to the issues that have arisen since a DSpace  
instance is released.  And this would be to setup appropriate WIki  
pages which can be edited by users to document new issue as they  
arise both before and after a release has been cut.  This will both  
speed up the release process and provide a nice convention location  
to track the issues and get appropriate feedback from our user-base.

http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/DSpace_Release_1.4.0_Notes
http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/DSpace_Release_1.4.1_Notes
http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/DSpace_Release_1.4.2_Notes
http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/DSpace_Release_1.4.3_Notes
http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/DSpace_Release_1.5.0_Notes
http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/DSpace_Release_1.5.1_Notes

It is my feeling that these URL's already provide an adequate jumping  
point for discovering documentation on the KNOWN ISSUES in a DSpace  
Version.  Would there be any argument with adopting the usage of  
these for documenting these details rather than static files in the  
SVN repository? The Static README File could then point into these  
pages and thus allow the users of DSpace to take up a post release  
documentation effort

It also seems these locations would be adequate for listing out the  
CHANGES that have occurred, but I do like the process that listing  
ones changes in the CHANGES file introduces into the community.   
However, as the project grows and becomes more modular, listing  
changes that may have happened in each separate component in one  
centrally located file quickly becomes intractable.  So I would  
recommend either doing away with the practice, or coming up with a  
better way to list out the work that commiters have done in a  
particular project using separate CHANGES (Or possibly just WIKI  
pages like identified above).

What are the developers (and more explicitly the commiters) opinion  
on this topic?

Sincerely,
Mark Diggory

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mark R. Diggory - DSpace Developer and Systems Manager
MIT Libraries, Systems and Technology Services
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Home Page: http://purl.org/net/mdiggory/homepage






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