Proposal: Activity developers mailing list

[Morgan Collett]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 04:42, Bastien <bastienguerry at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Any follow-up on the idea of having a precise list of maintainers for
> all Sugar activities?  Even just the email address from the git repo
> would be nice.

I've raised the idea a couple of times to have a mailing list
specifically for activity developers, which would be uncluttered by
all the traffic on the devel and even sugar lists. That would
hopefully have the result that people stay subscribed, or at least
notice mails which are important to them.

Currently, I'm not even sure which list out of devel and sugar is
going to reach more activity developers, hence this cross-post and
many others.

There are a bunch of issues I'm aware of which need to be communicated
clearly and widely:

* A lot of activities need updating. There are a good number of us who
can help, if we can get the attention of the original / most recent
maintainers/authors. We would be willing to do new releases, and we
will do so (technically forking) without their help if we don't get
their attention.

* There is a new activity updater in the control panel in joyride.
There is a certain procedure to provide specific versions of the
activity for specific builds, so that (future) stable builds get a
certain version available, whereas development builds can get other
versions of the activity. The exact procedures around that need to be
communicated, in such a way that a significant number of activity
developers *do* them.

* It would be great to have a specific procedure for someone to say "I
developed this activity, I don't have time to maintain it against
future releases, it's available for someone to take over". I suspect
several interesting activities are in this position.

* We need a way to communicate API changes, new resources, etc to
activity developers without this getting lost in the "noise" of the
existing lists. We need a way to get clear feedback on these without
getting swamped by non activity developers.

* We need to make it easier for new activity developers to get up to
speed without having to wade through information they don't need.

I am happy to take on making this communication happen but I really
think we need this list.

I know it's yet another mailing list, but I think it will help make
our communication more focussed and effective.

I'm adding this to the agenda of today's (tonight's for me) Sugar
development meeting. Please comment here in advance of the meeting, or
come to the meeting for a more immediate discussion.

Morgan