Domas Mituzas wrote:
Hi Magnus,
I'll be on the 22C3, so maybe we could discuss these things in person.
Not everyone of us may come to 22C3, but everyone involved in site operation are discussing our changes in IRC channels constantly. In real life developers have proper meetings, we can't afford those, so online communication is preferred. Some features could be discussed using Skype as well.
Long email threads maybe can be tracked in future, but they do not help with proper cooperation and collaboration.
So far it was always absolutely efficient and easy to communicate any changes to other developers on #mediawiki or #wikimedia-tech.
IRC is fine, but with different timezones it's hard to be uptodate. For example, tim & brion are chatting a lot early morning, there is a lot of activity on Sunday. Not everyone is able to be on IRC 24/24 to track all the activity (although we can still read logs). Also, Magnus is not on IRC, which doesnt help either.
Long emails are good, but wikitech-l is flooded with several issues. It can either be issues with the wikifarm or the mediawiki code.
I think we could use a dedicated mailing-list where only devs / sysadmin would be able to post (rest will be heavily moderated). Then when someone do something important, he can send an email to that list and will be sure everyone will know about it. The server admin log on wikitech is just about that, but for the farm only.
I would love to do developers meeting every 3 months or so, but with lot of us in europe and the core developers in australia and usa ... It's a bit hard (or we have to be really rich).
An example of "yet another tool" that we could use one day: http://www.dotproject.net/ (let you create projects with tasks, assign people to them etc..). Anyway, that might not be the best solution to solve a communication trouble :o)
cheers,
(thanks deadchip@bmpx for the dotproject.net link)