Our biweekly meetings

[Barry Warsaw]

On Sep 13, 2011, at 10:46 PM, James Westby wrote:

>The reason that I haven't been at the last few meetings is that I'm not
>someone who is naturally awake at 7am, so I've tended to miss them. I
>can make a more consistent effort if desired. To be clear, I don't
>resent the time, I realise we are in a near-impossible situation, it's
>just hard to argue with my sleeping self sometimes :-)

Trust me, I totally get that.  If I didn't have a middle-schooler who had to
be at the bus at 7am, I'd be in same situation (read: summer :).

>I'm not sure that it's directly related to the meetings, but I wonder if
>everyone is in a similar position to me, where they aren't sure where we
>are on the roadmap we outlined at UDS, and hence what would be next to
>work on. Indeed whether that roadmap is still the right order in which
>to be doing things.

I do think having a highly visible and accurate roadmap would help our users,
most of whom are not going to follow our discussions closely, either on this
list or IRC.

>I agree that highlighting success would be good, and a roadmap at least
>defines what success is, but to know if you are progressing you need to
>keep track of where you are.

Well, if you ask me, UDD is already a huge success, because I can't imagine
developing for Ubuntu any other way.  Yes, there are rough edges, but for most
of my daily activity, it just works and works great.  On the increasingly rare
cases where I have to drop back to old skool packaging, it's just so painful.
More than that, I can see a future where UDD is such a compelling end-to-end
story that it's the way everyone *wants* to develop for Ubuntu.

The question for me is how to best evangelize UDD to get more people using it.
I think this does mean fixing the biggest warts, which I would put in roughly
this order: solving the quilt problem, fixing importer errors, better handling
of native branches / merging between unrelated branches, performance
improvements.  It also means adding some big incentive new features like
build-from-branch-into-archive.

In the context of these meetings, if they're helpful in accomplishing these
goals, I am all for continuing them.  If they're a distraction or irrelevant,
then the mailing list and the occasional F2F meetings at UDS and sprints can
work just as well.

>In addition I don't know if we aren't making progress in some area we
>could be because it isn't clear. I would hate to think that I was
>holding things (or even worse: people) up because I wasn't doing
>something.
>
>If I'm not the only one, then we could look at ways of fixing that,
>which may involve the meeting. If I am the only one then I'll work out
>what I need to do to stay up to date, and maybe that involves setting my
>alarm clock :-)

Or adopting a middle school child, but hey whatever works for you. :)

-Barry
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-distributed-devel/attachments/20110914/a462134a/attachment.pgp>