[Bf-docboard] Coordination between devs and us

[Jonathan Merritt]

Hi Jean,

Jean Montambeault wrote:
>Just send me to h**l if this is an old beaten topic but : is there a
>mechanism that has been established so the devs would let us know when the
>add/remove/modify something as soon as possible ?

I think communication could be better, but there are already a few
sources of information.

Firstly, there's the bf-committers mailing list.  This often contains
development discussions as well as summaries of development meetings
held on IRC.  Also, you can view the CVS commits via the bf-blender-cvs
mailing list to see what's actually going in to the repository.
Subscriptions to both of these lists can be found here:
    http://projects.blender.org/
(in the block labelled "Official Blender Release")

If you get to the level of detail of wanting to track down a change in
the repository itself (eg: if you know what file it involves) then you
can use the cvs log command.  eg:
    cvs log source/blender/src/view.c

Finally, for the actual releases, Ton has so far managed to maintain
(IMHO) a very good set of release logs.  For example:
    http://www.blender.org/cms/Blender_2_40_alpha.598.0.html

You might ask why all of this information isn't available in the one
place.  However, it's often not as easy as you would expect for
developers to keep track of everything that requires documentation
changes.  There are frequently changes that may not affect an end-user
very much (only a performance increase, for example).  Also, patches are
often contributed by people and then committed to the repository by
somebody else.  It's currently not clear who takes "ownership" of the
follow-up when that happens (esp. if a patch is committed several months
after submission and then with some modifications).

Jonathan Merritt.