Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo World Domination. a 10 step guide

[Roy Bamford <neddyseagoon@gentoo.org>]

On 2006.10.04 15:27, Chris Gianelloni wrote:

[snip]

> 
> I'll give you Release Engineering's "status reports" for September,
> October, and November:
> 
> September: taking a well-deserved break
> October: taking a well-deserved break
> November: taking a well-deserved break
> 
> How about other projects that rely on things like upstream's release
> cycle?  What about projects that just maintain ebuilds?
> 
> Here's the games team's "status reports" for every month:
> 
> "Fixed more bugs, added more packages, cleaned up some ebuilds."
> 
> Now, perhaps what everyone would like, instead, would be status
> reports
> *where necessary* from certain projects?
> 
> In fact, the council has been discussing asking a few projects about
> the
> status on some of their tasks.  The main reason for this is for
> communications purposes.  Basically, we'd just get a "Hey, where are
> you
> at on $x?" response from the teams.
> 
> I don't *want* to drown projects in bureaucracy and paperwork.  I want
> them to *accomplish* things, instead.
> 
> --
> Chris Gianelloni
> Release Engineering Strategic Lead
> Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
> Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee
> Gentoo Foundation
> 

Before you can have useful reports, you need a plan to report against.
Like a target date for 2007.0 and its contents. Such a plan depends on  
other projects delivering the contents in accordance with their own  
plans. Like real life, these plans will have external dependencies on  
$UPSTREAM, that Gentoo has little or no control over.

With progress reports against plans and updated plans, everyone can see  
whats happened, why some things haven't and what the fallback is, if  
one is required.

The old saw, "If you don't have a plan, then plan to fail" remains true  
for volunteer projects as well as funded ones.

The content and update rate of plans/reports can vary from project to  
project and it need not be onerous. Reporting can even be by exception,  
so to take your "well-deserved break" example, if it was in your plan,  
no report would be needed.

Regards,

Roy Bamford
(NeddySeagoon)


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