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

[Leif Madsen]

John Todd wrote:
> 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

Seems like a nice side effect, but not a primary reason to do this.

>    - 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)

Also a nice side effect.

>    - 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 think this is a good reason to do (even minimal) tagging. While the 
thread topic can be pretty obvious, if someone is going to start a new 
thread which will discuss a design decision, it certainly makes it a lot 
easier in the future to search the mailing lists to find a certain 
thread about some design decision that was made in the past. With just 
the thread topic it can be difficult to wade through all the results 
that get returned, but if you can just search for [design] or [policy], 
then you can narrow down your search to a greater extent.

> 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)

I like these ones. And remembering 4 tags isn't really all that hard on 
my brain.

> [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,
> 

These seem somewhat unnecessary and slightly too fine grained. Keeping 
the tags broad is probably going to allow them to be more easily applied 
to a topic. I shouldn't have to sit there for 30 seconds trying to 
decide whether I should be tagging this [design] or [tactical].

> 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.

Makes sense to me. And not every message needs to be tagged, but 
discussions like changing some sort of dialplan syntax should definitely 
have a [design] tag on it. This gives it some sort of a marker that 
says, "Hey! This may be important to you!".

> 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?

I don't think this should really be necessary. I like the idea, but the 
overhead involved is probably too much, and the subject *should* be 
clear enough if it is a well formed subject.

Personal opinion is that trying to tag some of the more important 
subject lines can't hurt anyone (except for those who think you don't 
need more than an 80 char wide screen), and only has the potential to 
help improve community relations and transparency.


--
Leif Madsen
http://www.leifmadsen.com
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/asterisk