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

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 09:09:06PM -0700, John Todd wrote:
> 
> 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)

I suspect those three are two difficult to separate. "Design" is
supposed to be a discussion about the future. Hence anybody with a sane
mind should know that it is a waste of time to read.

(Sorry for being sarcastic.)

But the design goals are almost always missing features or existing bugs.
Someone is talking about a strange thing called "CEL", and it is
actually the thing that may solve your problem with CDR.

Asterisk is a big elephant, and us blind people are often only aware of
parts of it.

> [policy]   - to discuss policy, politics, or method comments (eg: coding
>                 guidelines)

Fine

> [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,

I also believe that those two fall under "standard list traffic. They
already have the label [asterisk-dev] . And sometimes
[asterisk-dev] Re: [asterisk-dev]

Here's an alternative: 

[summary] After a long discussion, a summary of the main opintion will
          be of great help to those who have no time to read everything
	  and want to read the conclusions and/or the most important
	  messages of the thread.

> 
> 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?]

Some bad mailers may be confused by that. I hope nobody here uses such a
mailer...

> 
> 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.).  

The Mantis has a [patch] "tag" in the title line. "SIP" etc. are a
hirarchy of topics rather than tags. 

> 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?

How do I tag a question about an issue with the jitter-buffer in a call
between Zap and IAX2?

Nah. Discussions freely drift among topics. And off-topic.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
icq#16849755              jabber:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
+972-50-7952406           mailto:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
http://www.xorcom.com  iax:guest at local.xorcom.com/tzafrir