[Bf-committers] Weekly meetings and communication channels

[Campbell Barton]

On Sat, Sep 2, 2017 at 6:55 AM, Corey Richardson <corey at octayn.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 1, 2017, at 16:48, Corey Richardson wrote:
>> I created This Week in Rust and also spearheaded the transition to
>> Discourse (including all the initial setup + admin). You _can_ interact with
>> discourse through email, but it's somewhat clunky. Definitely less pleasant than
>>
>
> ... mailman (imo). But, a lot of people prefer the web interface anyway
> and it definitely lowers the barrier to entry. It seems email is less and less
> preferred among newcomers.
>
> Here's some advice, for creating something like This Week in Blender:
>
> - Figure out how to automate as much as possible.
>
> This can be including a special string in commit messages
> (NEWSLETTER or something), mailing list messages, phabricator
> whatsnots, etc. It doesn't need to be intrusive, just machine-findable.
>
> If you can write a script that generates the skeleton of the
> newsletter from those sorts of tags, it saves a LOT of work
> for the maintainer/editor.
>
> In practice, most submissions came through IRC. Otherwise,
> at first, I manually looked at the list of all pull requests merged
> since the last issue and looked at all the reddit posts, discourse
> threads, etc.
>
> A list-of-links like TWiR has become (due to sheer volume of stuff)
> isn't very valuable on its own. One or two sentence summaries of
> important work can give casual readers/non-devs insight into the
> goings on in a way that clicking random links doesn't.
>
> Hope these comments are useful :)

Thanks for the info, your comments about automation match my experience too.
If something becomes too much of a chore, it often ends up getting abandoned.

>From a dev perspective, we already:

- Write commit logs.
- Reply on tracker explaining the fix (sometimes)
- Write a weekly report (anyone hired to work on Blender)
- Update release notes (for significant changes).
- Maybe update/write docs in www.blender.org/manual
  (or ask one of the document authors to help out).

The challenge AFAICS is how to do this without causing extra hassles,
by relying on people who have free time to write up an activity log
AND/OR making it very easy for developers to contribute changes.

-- 
- Campbell