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 wrote:
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?
I could not agree more - and I know Morten also agrees. Point taken - minutes will be.
- Vidar
On Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:01:13 +0200 Stein Magnus Jodal stein.magnus.jodal@uninett.no wrote:
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.
Great post, Stein Magnus!
I'll comment your post as a whole.
The nav-dev list was once quite active, especially during the summers when the house was filled with summer interns. Since we opened the list to the world (and in the process, switching from Norwegian to English as the list's primary language), activity has dropped to near zero, as you point out.
I think there are many factors contributing to this.
One factor is probably the language barrier. Why bother with taking the time to formulate your thoughts in English and posting them on a public mailing list, when you know that all the developers you're trying to reach all speak Norwegian, in which you are a million times more fluent anyway? Of course, the fallacy of this is that it makes it harder to attract attention to NAV from developers from other countries.
Related to the language barrier is the fact that most of the current devs are in-house here at UNINETT, and we are having biweekly status meetings. Its quicker (and more social) to just drop in on another dev and ask your questions there, or discuss them at the biweekly meetings.
Before the list was opened to the public, it was also used to discuss internal matters at NTNU and/or UNINETT which touched on NAV. Some things still remain internal matters and may need a lot of rephrasing to fit in public forum, and so it becomes easier to just distribute some ideas and have a discussion with all the involved parties in the To: and Cc: headers. Or maybe just chat about it on IRC and Jabber.
But your point is taken; if NAV development is to be as transparent as we want it to be, we need to start using this mailing list more.
Vidar picked up on this immediately and posted his minutes from the latest meeting, as you've no doubt seen. I just work slower than him, that's all ;)
Changes like the unification of the four NAV databases into four schemes in one database, which apparently happened recently.
I think this may partly be a misunderstanding on your behalf, and partly an internal matter.
The unification hasn't happened in the real world yet (i.e. it's not on the default branch). I have a branch up on MetaNAV, called db-namespaces, which contains the changes necessary to join the four NAV databases into a single multi-namespace database. This branch is in effect on our development server here at UNINETT.
This development server is an example of what I call internal matters. A lot of the discussions about what we are doing on and with this server isn't really for the public, it's for us here at UNINETT. We discuss it a lot on IRC, but that's not the same as announcing it publicly on a mailing list with an archive. Close, but not the same ;)
The results, findings and code churned out using this server is, however, potential food for this list.
(I'm starting to believe writing a Master's thesis won't be too hard, once I get started. ;-) )
I thought you already held that belief, since you're only expecting to work three days a week on your thesis? ;)
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Morten Brekkevold -
Stein Magnus Jodal -
Vidar Faltinsen