Re: [Libreoffice-qa] minutes of ESC call ...

Hey,

On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 5:05 PM, Stephan Bergmann <sbergman@redhat.com>
wrote:

> * Berlin German community meeting (Thorsten)
>
>      + Hard to track changes going in for non fulltime devs (Björn)
>          + somebody to summarize the commits going in?
>          + would that actually be useful? (Michael S)
>          + Stephan not eager to do such weekly summaries
>          + Mentoring person to come up with that?
>          + Good idea, but unclear who’s going to do it. (Michael M)
I know I'm quite late with this but as I was one of the person who was
quite involved in the discussion let me extend a bit on this point.

In my opinion we have two problems right now that we somehow need to deal
with: most of the discussion and communication happen on IRC which excludes
everyone who can not be around all the time and quite a lot of the work
that happens is not visible if you are able to follow all the commits. I
think that the communication on IRC itself is fine and that we maybe only
need to make it a bit easier to follow the most important development info
if you are not on IRC.

In my opinion we can improve on both points if we start to use the mailing
list a bit more for announcing important work that we have just added to
master. As a positive example let me point you to Thorsten's announcement
of the merge of the EMF work [1]. The mail tells everyone what has happened
(new EMF parser framework that will replace the old parser), gives an
overview of future plans around and how to help with the work on it.

I don't think that regularly summarizing commits is a useful idea but
instead announcing when important work has landed that is useful for more
people would make it easier for everyone to follow the development and also
make sure that the most important information can be found on the mailing
list.

As an example of a commit (or series of commits) where I was hoping to see
a comment how this can be used by other developers I noticed [2] (note that
this is just an example and most of us would not have send a mail) which
looks really interesting but even for someone following development closely
it is not clear how and when to use that feature.

So my suggestion would be that we all try to write a few lines in a mail
when we have committed something that can/should be used by more developers.

What do you think?

Regards,
Markus

[1] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2017-July/078101.html
[2]
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=81413799eb4f38d62710b295268249307364000a