[Pharo-dev] About contribution process, people participation and communication (WAS: Re: [ANN] Pharo 8.0 development started)

[Esteban Lorenzano via Pharo-dev]

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Hi Torsten (again),

What I see in your mails, and what I think is most important to discuss, is a 
subjacent critique about the way we communicate our changes. And maybe more 
than that: a disagreement about the general direction of changes in process.

While I recognise we can communicate better (and we take any criticism in that 
sense as a remark of our need to improve), is not fair to say that we did not 
announce what we were doing: 

- it is told and very discussed the fact that we were going to a git based 
process and supported by github. This *was* discussed and announced. And we 
worked a lot last year to make it possible (and is the main reason why we 
delayed P7 release).
- We announced that we were moving our issue tracker to GitHub at least 6-8 
months before (in fact we were ready to do it in that moment but we delayed it 
“for Pharo8” to avoid transition problems.
- We announced that we wanted to have at least two branches opened at same 
time, and to make that possible. 

Now, while the general direction was explained, I think I failed to communicate 
several things.
For what I can think at this moment (for sure there are a lot more):  

- I failed to communicate that opening Pharo 8.0 branch didn’t mean closing 
Pharo 7.0 development, just to allow people doing big changes to merge them.
- I failed to communicate correctly that having a release candidate (rc1) meant 
“code freeze” (and then forbidding new changes except bug fixing).

New process is different than old process. 
And we had transition problems (and we still have some). 
But new process is a lot better than old one. Is faster, shorter and it allows 
us to have different branches alive :)

But well, let’s focus in the positive: We are improving in an area that is 
always hard, which is process. 
I’m deeply sorry if someone felt alienated in the process of changing process 
(I know for windows users it was a problem until we introduced Tonel, for 
example). 
And specially, we are willing to improve. 
So, I’d like to see your suggestions (and any one else with ideas) on how can 
we improve both process and communication. 

Esteban

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