Re: Status reports - why not regularly?

Hi,

There seems to have been quite a bit of discussion about this while I
was sleeping.  Since I'm the one who has done these reports, I'll toss
in some comments.

The primary reason why the reports have gotten less frequent is because
of lack of time on my part.  It is _not_ (as some suggested) because
developers are too lazy to send me reports when I ask for them.  It just
happens that whenever it's time to start soliciting reports for the
bi-monthly thing, either a release cycle has just start or just ended.
So I'm either swamped or highly burnt out.  I enjoy putting the reports
together, and I really do feel bad that I haven't kept up on them since
they are so valuable.

The bottleneck in this process is not that it takes too much time/effort
to put them together.  Taking all of the submissions and turning them
into a report takes about 1-2 evenings.  There is of course a but of
overhead spent on sending the solicitation emails and reminders, but
it's not all that bad.  It really comes down to me being too busy to
remember to start the process.

There was a hint at suggesting that we should move to the Linux LKML
model, where someone follows the mailing list and writes brief summaries
on it.  I think that that would be an excellent project, and I highly
encourage someone to take that on.  However, I don't think that that
would totally replace the bi-monthly report, since those allow the
developers to go into a bit more detail than what can be summarized on
a list.  So I think that both forms of reports could complement each
other very well.

As for having another bi-monthly status report, let me start up the
process tonight for the Nov-Dec 2003 report.  Stay tuned.....


Scott

Antal Rutz wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I just read the status report of the year 2003 from DragonFlyBSD.
> 
> I ask (not only) myself why don't we have something like this monthly or 
> bi-monthly. I regularly read the cvs-src and current lists, but surely there 
> are many developments that I can't understand from the commit messages. And 
> what about a regular user, who just reads some relnotes and can't see the 
> continuous work?
> 
> There are weekly news about what code got into the latest Linux kernels.
> But I'd like to know what's going on about FreeBSD! I don't think so that it 
> would take a whole day to just write down a few lines every (second) month 
> about the work is in progress and/or done.
> 
> The last of these reports was written in September last year (by Scott Long 
> and Robert Watson).
> pity.
> 
> My intention is far from hurting anybody. Just want to get the information 
> what other OS-users (linux/dragonfly) got.
> 
> --
> 
> 
> --arutz
> 
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