This is the first summary of the traffic on the bootstrap list, covering messages until 4 Aug 2000. The task of the list is to find a communiity structure for the brainstorming process. We discussed several solutions, and went with a hierarchical mailing list solution. Each working group (e.g., "language" or "internals") can have sub-groups. Each group, whether top or lower level, has a chair, a deadline, and a mission. Groups must report to their parents on a weekly basis. There's also a perl6-all mailing list, created in response to fears that generalists would be left out. The current set of mailing lists are: language, internals, stdlib, qa, build. Addition suggestions have been received for meta (discussion of process and requests for new mailing lists), licensing, documentation, unicode, and regexps mailing lists. They're being weighed by the project leader. See http://dev.perl.org/lists.shtml for a list. We discussed the need for these groups to produce documents. These RFCs needed a structure. Several suggestions were made, and a simple format decided (it is at http://dev.perl.org/rfc/meta). RFCs are submitted to the librarian who automatically posts them to the web and forwards them to the -announce and appropriate discussion mailing lists. We discussed holding the RFCs on SourceForge, but the urgency meant SourceForge's learning curve would have delayed the library too long. The librarian will still investigate SourceForge. There are proposals to change the name of RFCs on the grounds of confusion with Internet RFCs which are standards (our RFCs are merely suggestions to Larry), and to add a status field to RFCs to indicate whether discussion on them is open or closed. Further, it is suggested that we need some way to register not just interest in a proposal, but also disinterest. These discussions are ongoing. bootstrap's heavy traffic has mostly moved to the language and internals mailing lists. Nat
