I'll continue my offtopic :) Let's take 'django-developers' list for example. It is public and have 5898 (!) subscribers. This is where all discussions about how to improve django lives. Only a small part of these thousands of subscribers actually discuss something. Most of people just read. This help a lot with understanding the goals of the project, the development process, the reasons behind design decisions, alternate points of view, the personnel of core developers and the intended usage of django features. I read this list and it is clear for me that core developers are extremely smart guys, the decisions are weighted and they are open for suggestions. This is really attractive and make me confident. With all these information it is much easier to understand how to contribute to django: what kind of improvements do django need, what proposals will be certainly rejected, what is happening now in trunk and why. They don't have to write blog posts 'we are doing something' just to remind about themselves. Any feature that is proposed to be landed in trunk is discussed publicly so anyone can share his ideas. And it works. The situation when core developer proposes something, it gets discussed for death and then something that is better but completely different from the initial proposal lands in trunk is not unusual.
There is also a private list for django core developers where they discuss security-related problems and have some private (personal) discussions that don't relate to development of django. And they was recently bashed on DjangoCon because of this so core developer was forced to explain what is this list for and what is it not for. I think there is the "chicken or the egg" dilemma. Open discussion about design decisions helps a lot with understanding the development process and motivation behind the decisions. This is the benefit for opening discussions up. It is much harder to contribute something useful without this understanding. It is really helpful to know the reasons behind the decisions and be able to read the discussions that lead to solutions. There are a lot of people who want to know more about mootools and don't have anything to contribute right now but they may have something in future. They all can't learn because you don't know these people so you can't invite them to your private list. >From the outside it looks like "mootools 1.3 beta1 ... several months ... mootools 1.3 beta 2 ... a lot of github forks ... what are these guys doing and why? what about mootools 2.0? what is it for? can i use it right now or not? i want something great for my server-side development and i'm willing to contribute and fix bugs but i don't know if mootools 2 will fit because i don't know what is it going to be and what are the reasons behind decisions - and all the same for mootools art / ui library". It is possible that mootools developers also have no ideas what e.g. mootools 2 will finally look like but they certainly have some goals and thoughts and directions and if somebody's goals match mootools goals and the direction seems right to somebody then he/she can start using this and helping to move things forward. Having a place to chat is nice but I still don't understand why development discussions should be hidden. I don't want to be offensive, your guys are great and smart and mootools is awesome, and you definitely knows better how to organize effective development process, just wanted to share some thoughts. On 17 сен, 05:23, Christoph Pojer <[email protected]> wrote: > About our private mailing list: ++ to everything Aaron said. Also, we > manage our resources (server, website, etc.) in there. We have huge > discussions that aren't necessarily meant for the public - they are > between the developers and there is no benefit for anyone in opening > it up. We usually invite lots of people if they show a willingness to > improve MooTools. Anyone who shows a positive attitude can get on the > list. People who do not care enough also do not need to have access. > This has nothing to do with us being secretive or anything, we are as > open as possible. If you start contributing, we will eventually invite > you. Until then, feel free to hang out with use here or in #mootools > on freenode
