Hi NAV developers and followers,
The nav-dev mailing list should be the primary location for discussions
and (intra-release) news related to the development of NAV.
Sadly, the mailing list is rather inactive and have only seen about 64
posts in the last two years, and only eight this year. This is a paradox
given that NAV got several geographically separated contributors, in
addition to seven(!) people (counting students/summer interns) working
with NAV at UNINETT. That's a lot of people.
...and it's starting to become a lot of changes. During the fall I'm
supposed to work actively on NAV while living in Oslo. I haven't left
yet, but I'm already feeling a bit out of the information loop by not
attending all of the biweekly status meetings. (Which was initiated
earlier this spring, being a useful event both for synchronization of
work and getting motivation. Motivation I will still need to get some
way or another during the fall.)
The fact that NAV development is finally gaining momentum through new
heads, a new distributed VCS (Mercurial), new development frameworks
(Django and Twisted) and code cleanup is fabulous. (And who knows
what's next? Unit tests, continuous integration and nightly builds?)
With increased momentum it follows naturally that our information flow
also needs a bit more current. Let's direct that current to this public
mailing list, thus at the same time motivating old, new and future users
of NAV to contribute development time and patches.
Finally arriving at my point.
I would like to suggest, as a start, that the minutes from the biweekly
NAV status meetings are posted to this list. A "these two weeks in NAV
development" newsletter. What has changed? What are the status of
upcoming changes? Who is working at what?
In that way I, and the 33 other people at this list, would be given a
heads up at most two weeks after changes. Changes like the unification
of the four NAV databases into four schemes in one database, which
apparently happened recently.
(I'm starting to believe writing a Master's thesis won't be too hard,
once I get started. ;-) )
--
Stein Magnus Jodal
UNINETT