[asterisk-dev] [policy] Discussion on IRC - how to make -dev more useful

[John Todd]

This evening on IRC there was some discussion about how to possibly 
make -dev a more useful place for those people who are time 
constrained, or who simply don't want to wade through a lot of 
messages looking for the things that they may find relevant. 
Asterisk is a program with a huge array of possible areas of 
expertise and interest, and the -dev mailing list I believe is an 
appropriate place for developer commentary.  However, this wide menu 
of potential thread areas may overwhelm a portion of the community 
who otherwise only care about particular parts of the system which is 
in their niche or is worthy of their attention for more strategic 
reasons.  To hopefully allow those people to better participate, and 
also to categorize threads for those of us who try to read 
everything, some ideas were discussed today that I'd like to 
summarize here.

As part of a personal belief that IRC is for discussion but not for 
"action", I'd like to distill the short comments made on the 
#asterisk-dev channel here on the -dev mailing list so that more 
people can both read and comment on the concepts.

Most systems of collection use some sort of tag idea to keep lines of 
thought separate, or at least to allow easy filtering if separation 
is needed later.  The bugtracker, for example, uses a large number of 
tags to enforce various categorizations, and it seemed to help 
everyone when a long time ago we shifted to putting things like 
"[patch]" in the title of bugs to indicate the nature of the content 
(though it could be argued that those text blobs could be better 
handled inside the bug report.)  However, email is not the firmly 
structured form of a web page (thankfully!) and therefore there are 
typically only a very few tags that are used to maintain coherence. 
On the -dev list, there are actually no tags that are external to 
each individual message to enable categorization.  Threads may be 
self-tagging (the Subject: line is the same) but that's it - hardly 
sufficient when one is trying to sort out important topics like 
long-range design discussions that might be happening deep inside a 
thread about something otherwise obscure.

Perhaps it would be a useful idea to have a tagging system for posts to -dev.

This would provide several benefits:

   - allow infrequent readers to disregard certain large portions of 
discussions that do not interest them, or to focus on things that do 
interest them
   - create an obvious marker that would flag certain conversations to 
the frequent reader base as important and worth more time (i.e.: 
design issues which may be important)
   - eliminate accusations (and often truth) of opaqueness in the 
future on design and policy discussions of the past, as they will 
have been obviously marked during prior threads on -dev


I propose the following subject area tags which would prepend the 
Subject: line in many (most?  all? "all" is pretty ambitious) posts 
to the -dev list - feel free to add, delete, modify, and discuss:

[design]   - for long-term design decisions, future or present
[bug]      - to discuss a bug that exists (NOT for design discussions
                that are felt to be bugs by some)
[feature]  - for discussing feature requests (incomplete standards
                implementation is not a bug, though it looks like one)
[policy]   - to discuss policy, politics, or method comments (eg: coding
                guidelines)
[tactical] - to discuss implementation details or questions for those
                working on code that relates to bugs or features that
                are in progress.  This is the most difficult area to
                keep clear, since often these issues will stray across
                boundaries.
[other]    - anything that doesn't fit above, including general
                announcements,

Tags can shift, and more than one tag can be applied to a message. 
[Is this a good idea? Should it be the case that anything that has 
two tags really should be split into two threads?]

I believe it would be best to have a short "FAQ" of these points on a 
web page, for which the URL is embedded into the footer of each 
posting so that the list is ubiquitously accessible on every message.

Another idea might be to include the general subject area in the 
posting title, just like Mantis now
has tags for general areas of code (SIP, apps, AGI, etc.).  I think 
this is asking a bit much, since nobody is going to easily remember a 
longer list of subject areas.  However, maybe an optional area 
identifier would be a good idea too - anyone have comments on this?

JT

-- 
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John Todd              jtodd at digium.com
Asterisk Open Source Community Director