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. ;-) )