[Hobbitmon-developer] Time to get working.

[Buchan Milne]

On Tuesday, 6 July 2010 07:08:15 Neil Franken wrote:
> Hi All

Please, let's keep development discussions *only* on the developers list. If 
people interested in this are not on the developers list, they should join it. 
Unnecessary cross-posting between a development and a support list usually 
compromises one ...

> The list for
> Volunteers(http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/System_Monitoring_with_Xymon/Dev
> eloper_Guide#Xymon_volunteers_Roles_and_Responsiblity) should be closed
> for now.

I personally don't agree with the layout and some of the content of these 
"books" (IMHO, they are very biased to the way T.J. uses Xymon), and I see no 
reason that it should be outside of the Xymon project. I would prefer that the 
non-biased content on it be migrated into the Xymon project (wherever it is 
hosted). SF offers Mediawiki (among other software), so it should be easy in 
future to migrate the content, once we are in a position to enable Mediawiki 
on SF.

> If you are not on the list you can still contribute by testing
> and giving feedback.

But, that is a separate activity to development, and can already take place as 
is. What we need to focus on at present is development aspects. This should 
not pollute the "user" list.

> Right now we need to finalise the structure going
> forward. I think TJ hit the nail on the head by suggesting that that we
> should see the co-admin as project leaders.

Not necessarily, they are potentially different roles. Good software architects 
aren't necessarily good at administration, and vice versa.

> OK guys and gals the time
> has come for us to put rubber on the road and the only way we will do
> this is by getting organized.
> 
> I think it would be advisable to have 2-3 Team leads. Maybe we should
> break up the teams into geographical area's i.e. The Americas,
> Europe/Africa and Asia/Australia. This way the team leader can meet with
> their teams(on IRC,Skype etc) during a convenient time in their time
> zone. The team leaders can have a weekly meeting to report on progress
> and so on. This way only the team leads will have to make some
> arrangements around different time zones. Just to be clear I don't want
> us to have meetings for hours on end with no outcome.

For specific topics with a specific intended outcome, meetings are fine, but 
email discussions are often easier to keep on topic.

I think we need to discuss what the priorities are now, and how we are going 
to address them.

What I believe the priorities should be for now:
1)Fixing reported bugs on 4.2.x, and getting a good, stable 4.2.4 out
2)Finalise the feature plan for 4.3.x, document what is missing for a new 
4.3.x beta/rc
3)Discuss the current obstacles to adoption of Xymon by more users, and fit 
solutions to those obstacles into the 4.4/4.5/4.6 feature plan
4)Address project administration obstacles (e.g. get at least one more SF 
project admin added, add svn commit mails, setup various tools available on SF 
etc.)


> However we need to
> focus on getting the work done and unless we formalise this now I am
> afraid we will just descend into chaos.

We already descended into chaos, let's document the ideas that came out of the 
chaos, and move on to do what needs to be done in the immediate future, while 
providing a way for people enthusiastic about new features, layouts etc. to 
start working on those.

Regards,
Buchan