[tahoe-dev] "No Conversations in the Bug Tracker", help wanted for Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

I'm looking at this book "Producing Open Source Software" by Karl
Fogel. I kicked in some money on kickstarter to fund the second
edition of it. This section caught my eye:

http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#bug-tracker-usage

I think we haven't been doing this one. For example, looking at the
trac Timeline (https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/timeline), the
most recent ticket is #1209. Reading that ticket, including posts to
it made in the last couple of days, it sounds like a "conversation" to
me by Karl Fogel's definition.

The problem with this, according to Karl's book, is that then people
who read the mailing list are left out of conversations like that one.
That's a serious problem that can stymie forward progress. On the
other hand, I think this style has been working okay for us. If you
really want to understand all of the technical decisions, and the
reasoning behind them, then you have to read the trac timeline as your
daily newspaper or subscribe to get email from trac anytime a new
comment is published.

So I'm inclined to keep doing what we've been doing so far, which
seems to be working okay.

I think it would probably help a lot if someone were to volunteer to
publish the Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News again. Help wanted! There are a lot
of people who don't take the time to read tahoe-dev, much less
tahoe-dev+trac-timeline. And they aren't necessarily people who have
only a mild interest in Tahoe-LAFS. They include people who are very
interested in the technical details, and who have contributed
substantially to Tahoe-LAFS in the past, who are in that category. In
fact, I myself haven't read all the threads on tahoe-dev recently...

*looks*

Oh my goodness. There are dozens of threads that I haven't even opened
yet. This is terrible. I need to fix that. (I've been awfully busy
with LeastAuthority.com and also distracted by mourning the recent
death of Aaron Swartz, who was a personal friend and collaborator.)

Anyway, I myself am actually going to read all of tahoe-dev again, but
it would help other people who aren't going to do that if they could
read the Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News every week and stay up to date. The
Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News could consist of just a summary of each thread
from tahoe-dev and each active conversation from trac. Maybe not even
a "summary" of each one, but merely a statement of what the topic is,
that there was activity on that one this week, and a hyperlink to that
one.

So, if you're interested in contributing to the Tahoe-LAFS project,
please sign up to be the editor of the Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News! It
would be a great help to our community.

Regards,

Zooko

https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1209# repair of mutable
files/directories should not increment the sequence number