[Monotone-devel] Project Management

[Thomas Keller]

Hi all!

I noticed that the development of monotone is accelerating in terms of 
how many people work on/for monotone (projects) and how many people 
answer on the mailing list recently.

I also know that there are many interesting and also demanded projects 
(workspace merge, pluck improvements, automation improvements, ...) 
which are finally worked out, however what I miss here is some kind of 
project management, as it feels like all these things are more or less 
out of control in terms of "who does what?", "what project depends on 
another project?", "where can I find the project's files (in which 
branch)?" and "when does it land on n.v.m?".

Currently, the communication to synchronize that happens at four places, 
the most intermediate is of course the IRC channel, then the second most 
active the development list, furthermore there is a bug tracker (which 
seems to be slightly "forgotten" sometimes) and finally there is a Wiki 
which holds proposals and docs as well.
Now I don't say that any of these things should be dropped or replaced 
(though Thomas Moschny [thm], the author of TracMonotone, once asked 
here or somewhere else if a Trac Setup would be something for monotone, 
which would nicely integrate all of the different setups), no, I don't 
say that because I particularily know about the opinions of some core 
developers which basically say "its not about the tools, its about the 
code which is written".
However what I would expect is a little "leadership" of the core 
developers which assign and track tasks other developers are doing. I'm 
not long enough here to make a list who would actually be on it (I 
assume njs and graydon at least, but for the others...), but whoever 
feels responsible for that, he should take the task serious in the end.

I know project management is hard in Open Source projects. You can't 
force anybody to do something he doesn't like to do; probably the same 
is true if I ask a core developer if he'd like to do management tasks 
(hell, he'd probably love to code ANYthing but not do project 
management), but maybe one or two of you may agree with me that even in 
OS projects *some* management is needed...?

Now, with that said, I already see the endless mailing list thread 
coming up on this topic and in the end the thread dies and nothing 
happened, because everybody here has another point of view on this topic 
and there is no convergence for a minimalistic solution.

Still, I hope that some kind of convergence is achieved here, since I 
strongly believe that this project *needs* some management.


Thanks for your time if you read it until here.

Thomas.