bzr 2.1 retrospective

[Martin Pool]

On 19 February 2010 14:08, Ben Finney <ben+bazaar at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> writes:
> This is really great to see, as someone who uses Bazaar and doesn't hack
> it. Having these internal conversations out in the open to be observed
> and referenced as a matter of public record is *enormously* reassuring
> for me as a beneficiary of this project.

I'm glad you liked it.

>
>> * change: look harder at +assigned or +inprogress before starting
>> something new; get this down to zero and then there'll be more freedom
>> to choose
>
> Right. I think everyone knows intellectually that this is the sensible
> thing to do; but intellect rarely drives our moment-to-moment decisions.
> When we get time to work on a project it's natural to automatically go
> for the work that makes us feel good: the shiny new stuff.
>
> So it's important to recognise that human tendency, and actively set
> things up to positively divert more of that effort toward the
> outstanding uncompleted work.
>
> There's a danger in direct “incentives”, in that having too many of them
> tends to suppress rather than reinforce the desire to do the work. On
> the other hand it may be good to try setting up the work flow such that
> there's unusually low resistance to work on outstanding tasks.

Sure.  So how can we nudge people towards doing this?  Two things that
have been seen to work are making this visible, as the patch pilot
work does, and encouraging each other by visibly doing it, as John
recently did with new bugs.


>> Packaging for Windows continues to be a headache, with it being
>> somewhat labour intensive and specialized.
>
> How do primarily-Windows projects deal with automation of packaging,
> then? Should Canonical be seeking explicit donation of resources (time
> on external machines, etc.) to make use of those techniques that
> automate such a build?

It is mostly a matter of labor not hardware.  Perhaps we can find a
contractor who would be good at automating this; nominations welcome.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>