[Koha-devel] Release Manager 3.6

[Colin Campbell]

On 13/05/11 15:05, Tomas Cohen Arazi wrote:

> [1] We even stopped developing some features our librarians asked for
> until we could understand and fit into the dev community and the
> process itself. WE DON'T WANT TO FORK. Several times we had the
> feeling we could have spent our money/time in a more feature-providing
> way, but where confident that we could make our voice into the dev
> community. Day suspension fines is a feature we proposed to develop
> ourselves with some core-developer guidance but only got this answer:
> "liblime has developed that, wait for them to merge their branch". We
> are currently working with a small, harmless fork we can maintain
> updated.

I think there is a problem with the process that rfc's stake out areas
out areas of development then people wait around until the original
proposer delivers putting things on hold.
If it doesn't get delivered, delivered when expected or as expected then
everyone loses out. Really until you show some code its all wishful
thinking. ( I have a number of projects that will solve the world's ills
but I've not released any code yet ).
We should not be fearful of forking, the license we use could be seen as
encouraging it but insisting that having forked you preserve the rights
to the code you have just taken advantage of. With regular scheduled
releases its easier to keep the fork in touch with the main branch which
also makes it easier to fold it back in to the main line of development,
because even if your fork has features that others may not want, you
want all the good stuff that is in the main branch.

As a community we are very good at implementing the middle range
features (and don't belittle them they are what most of are users
cherish in the system ). We're a bit less good at the big chunks of
functionality but I'm sure thats fixable, (and Chris's successful
shifting to TT for 3.4 shows big things can be done). We're also a bit
behind the curve on the plumber like code maintenance tasks ( we are
going to have use warnings in all scripts oneday, right?) that have less
visible user impact but aid future development and avoid introducing bugs.

Colin

-- 
Colin Campbell
Chief Software Engineer,
PTFS Europe Limited
Content Management and Library Solutions
+44 (0) 845 557 5634 (phone)
+44 (0) 7759 633626  (mobile)
colin.campbell at ptfs-europe.com
skype: colin_campbell2

http://www.ptfs-europe.com