Re: developer newsletter

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 09:36:05AM -0000, Trevor Daniels wrote:
>
> Graham Percival wrote Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:19 AM
>
>> In the past few months, we've had a number of developers being
>> surprised at some of the build system changes.
>
> I don't think so.  Most of the 'lesser' developers
> don't push their more significant changes unless
> they see a positive response from a core developer,
> so this issue really affects only one or two people
> who push changes even though there has been a zero
> response.

Yeah, but 80% of the time, that person is me.  And I'm doing major
changes to the build system that could potentially screw up other
people.  When major developers (be it John in relation to
translation stuff, Carl about new developers, or Han-Wen and Jan
about anything) point out problems in stuff I did a few months
ago, it really makes me stop and re-evaluate what I'm doing.

I don't think that anybody would accuse me of not sending enough
emails -- but maybe that itself is the problem.  I send perhaps
100 emails each week, and of those, only 1 or 2 contain really
important proposals.  It's easy to miss the important ones, so
perhaps we should have an alternate venue for those proposals?

I mean, I don't make a proposal unless I really think it's a good
idea, so when I don't hear any objections after a few weeks, I
assume that there were no objections because everybody else also
thought it was good.  But empirical evidence now shows that this
isn't true, so I'm trying to find a way to discover these problems
earlier.

Cheers,
- Graham