Subject: Re: the making of an AbiWord developer
From: Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com)
Date: Wed Jan 10 2001 - 18:13:02 CST
On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 02:03:30PM -0800, Paul Rohr wrote:
> The reason I bring this up now is to help the current AbiWord development
> community realize that there are specific things you can do -- individually
> and collectively -- to continue the expansion of this fine development team.
You are correct. In particular, I think there's a lack of clear
priorities. A small set of core developers including Sam and Martin
know what needs to be done by when, and they do it. Most new
developers are starting out with miscellaneous patches (i.e. a new
importer and exporter). This is fine, but it might be helpful to teach
people what really needs doing.
> 1. Keep doing what you're doing.
> ---------------------------------
> The combination of a quality codebase, steady progress making more features
> Just Work, and regular releases of cleanly-packaged binaries is irresistable
> to both users *and* developers. Everybody wants to be a part of the Next
> Big Thing.
I agree.
> 3. Make reviewers happy.
> -------------------------
> Bob used to do a great job making sure that:
>
> - anyone interested in reviewing AbiWord had someone to talk to,
> - the published review got featured on our website, and
> - we all knew about any complaints the reviewer had.
>
> You can bet that any reasonable complaints which didn't get addressed before
> the review was published jumped to the top of our list soon after. ;-)
Speaking of Bob, I really miss the QA department. We used to have a
dedicated staff that did an excellent job of keeping Bugzilla current,
finding issues, and verifying fixes. I think this could be handled
very well by an army of voulenteers, or even just one or two, as I
requested in my plea at
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/00/December/0325.html.
We still have 50 pending bugs marked "QA TO VERIFY", and 68
unconfirmed bugs marked SUBMITTED.
> 4. Most importantly, revive the POWs and AWN so they both appear weekly.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes!!
> 12/98 Aaron Lehmann
:-)
> Why revive AWN?
> --------------
> More people read it, and it gets easily picked up by other news outlets for
> even broader dissemination. Sure, most of those people are users, but a
> fraction also hack. That's where your new developers are.
Maybe it should be brought back as Kernel Cousin AbiWord?
(kt.linuxcare.com). That way it would be in the same place as the
weekly summaries of Debian, Debian-Hurd, Wine, Gimp, Samba, and Linux.
> Why revive POWs?
Becuase they're fun!
> That's what happened to you, isn't it? :-)
Gee, our marketing professor is back :).
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