Darren J Moffat wrote:
This is an @opensolaris.org alias it is about working together as a community and identifying problems and discovering solutions. I don't think it is at all appropriate to bring up Sun business choices here. Where that is appropriate is when Sun employees need to justify to their manager what they are working on.
Darren brings up a good point here, and I thank him for making me remember that this isn't just a Sun-only developer list. However, this does bring to light a current problem: who is working on what, and how do the various "sponsoring" entities prioritize work?
I've run into this problem on a couple of large Open Source projects, and we do need to make things a bit more transparent. We have the same problem over here in the Java group - how do we coordinate bugfixing and feature additions within a large community of developers and users, where developers may come from a variety of sources, and users may also be interested in providing not just feedback/RFEs, but actual sponsorship for developer time.
Obviously, a developer is going to be most interested in producing work that their sponsor thinks is important (and, naturally, it is very possible for a developer to be his or her own sponsor). For a developer who doesn't have specific work directed by the sponsor, there needs to be some way for the community to prioritize work for that developer. That is, we as the community need to be able to let the developers know what is important to us, in an organized way.
Personally, I'd like to have the ZFS community have an open bug and RFE system that looks like the one for Java (check out: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/index.jsp), or something that provides similar features. We (the users) would have a much easier way to hunt down things going on with developers' work, and developers would have a much easier time determining what is considered widely important to the user community.
I've previously bitched about a lack of view of feature schedules for ZFS. This would solve that problem, also.
How about it folks - would it be a good idea for me to explore what it takes to get such a bug/RFE setup implemented for the ZFS community on OpenSolaris.org?
-Erik _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
