Hi All, Forum's and mailing lists are one topic that we discussed at the gathering. Like this thread there are different opinions. There will always difference of opinions on this, so the only way to resolve this is to support both, however, this is much easier to assert than implement...
First up, the mailing list isn't broken, it works, people use it, people get support, people discuss topics. Its really just a preference thing rather than something that needs urgent attention. This means we have the luxury of doing it right when we have a good solution to hand rather than having to jump to the first thing we come across. One crucial factor is efficiency of the core user/developers like myself, for instance if any new systems makes my job more difficult and costly in terms of time then the project suffers. I find mailing lists very efficient - how else I'm able to pull off being so active on the list yet still able to get my "day job" done. For me any forums posts will have to have a direct counterpart on the a mail lists - so I can do all support through the list where I'm most productive. Granularity of the online forum and mailing lists will also need to be honoured, so seperate mailing lists would have a direct counter part on the forum, and threads in the lists would also map to threads in the forums. This will be important to help keep the model of where to look for information consistent. Another critical factor is the setup and management of the forum and lists. Don currently is the backbone of openscenegraph.org and the services that the server provides like CVS and mailing lists. This heroic work is largely unseen and its not trivial. Adding extra website systems to the server is certainly possible, but such systems need to be learned, experiemented with before ever going live, this is alot of work, then maintaining them is potentially alot of work too. I'm technically not up to it, and don't have the time. Don is technically a wizzard when it comes to unix system, but is very very busy. To add more services to openscenegraph.org, while desirable has to come with addition of extra engineers dedicated to helping out. So.. if you have the itch of wanting forums, and you have the skills and willing to put up forums then please step forward. Intially prototype such a forum would best be done off the openscenegraph.org server, but once things look viable, we could look to moving things over to the openscenegraph.org server. Opening up access to the server will be another step that we'll need to look out, its not something that one does likely though. With any implementations of forums we'll need to fullfill the requirements which I jotted down above, as well as others that we as community refine. Perhaps its time to post a set of objective of the community section of the website alongside the other tasks like build, ok wait a few minutes... tinker tinker, pass me the wrench... squeek, right here it is: http://openscenegraph.org/osgwiki/pmwiki.php/Tasks/ForumMailingLists Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
