Hi all, Hugin-PTX has this great feeling about it. It is a unique mix of developers and users. In a single place we get creative artist's ideas and discussion; user support requests; and developers communication down to very technical details.
It makes it easy to stay on top of things about Hugin, Libpano, Enblend, Panini, and related tools; but at times the volume can become overwhelming - and I take a big chunk of the blame for this ;-) This has worked well so far, but we are growing and so is the level of activity and consequently the volume of messages, many of them very specifically targeted. We already set up separate mailing lists, e.g. for Google Summer of Code mentors. It's a simple way to keep traffic relevant. There have also been many off-list threads between many developers - most recently the restructuring of the enblend project that had about a dozen developers, builders, and testers, exchanging a high number of mails (I've counted over 50, and I don't even get everything that Christoph gets). So we got the 4.0 pre-release underway with little public awareness. Other such "development talk" happened on the mentors list - which needs to be confidential because some of the matter discussed (e.g. evaluation of students) are not public. I believe much of the developers communication is of public interest - or at least of interest for those who want to contribute. And being informed helps. As an example, this weekend Kornel and I exchanged about two dozen emails about a CMake build for enblend. Today we find out that Harry has been working on that from his end as well. If our communication would have been "in the clear", he would have known of our effort and we would have known of his. There is currently one developers mailing list, panotools-devel, but it is practically dead (and it is run on Sourceforge's infrastructure which makes web accesses a pain). Another thing about mailing lists are notifications: we have notification mailing lists for repository commits (at least SVN - I'm still looking at how to implement this on Mercurial in Sourceforge); and notifications from the bug/patch/feature trackers. Few people are aware of them - and I realized a few weeks ago that this can be critical, especially for developers. One of our GSoC students was not aware of a change that was relevant for his project. In an off-list discussion with Bruno we considered different options. * A single developers mailing list that includes all the notifications, like [VLC devel] (used by the VideoLAN developers). * Separation of developers talk from automatic notifications, but with automatic notifications form all the related projects going to a single mailing list. This means summarizing [hugin-cvs], [hugin-tracker], [panotools-cvs] and the likes into a single mailing list, ideally one with a better user interface than SourceForge that makes it very difficult to find out where to subscribe and that insist to present mailing list as (yuk!) forums The separation of developers talk should not make technical discourse disappear from Hugin-PTX. It should rather help keeping the balance, with the details that are currently discussed off-list being discussed on the new developers list. It will be left to the judgment of the individual developers what topics are better discussed there and what are better kept here; and the list would be publicly readable anyway, for easy cross-referencing. Since this would change the dynamics in the community, I would like to know how people here feel about it. Would the developers be inclined to join a dev-talk mailing list? and to subscribe to a single list with all automatic notifications? How would the translators, users feel about this? What is *your* opinion about having three mailing lists, one for the community at large; one for developers talk; and one for automated notifications? Yuv [VLC devel] http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/ [hugin-cvs] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hugin-cvs [hugin-tracker] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hugin-tracker [panotools-cvs] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/panotools-cvs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "hugin and other free panoramic software" group. A list of frequently asked questions is available at: http://wiki.panotools.org/Hugin_FAQ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
