[Lazarus] Project management

[Marc Santhoff]

Be warned, below there will follow a lot of personal opinions. ;)

Am Donnerstag, den 01.03.2012, 01:45 +0200 schrieb Juha Manninen:
> 2012/2/29 Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl>
>         Usually they are driven by a foundation and/or core team. Much
>         like FPC
>         nowadays, with occasional alliances with commercial parties
>         that sponsor a
>         certain development.
>         
>         There are not many alternative routes.
> 
> 
> I was hoping something more concrete and detailed, like ideas for
> helping new potential contributors to get a softer landing. That was
> the original idea of this thread.
> 
> Rich Saunders proposed "SMEs", people to intermediate between core
> developers and users. It may be a good idea, I only wonder how would
> it be organized in practical day-to-day life.
> 
> Many issues discussed here could be solved by improving documentation.
> Especially there should be a page listing tasks suitable for new
> people.
> However that does not change the management anyhow, it only helps
> people find those things easier.

Maybe it's a bit more than only improving documentation itself. The
project management part of it is to care for keeping docs up to date and
keep the shape following the needs. An example would be some kind of
general info pages about how the project is driven. Special index pages
or future plans come to my mind here.

Another issue with that is already in the works, that is transferring
content from the wiki to other doc parts. But this too is not only a
technical problem but it has to be done regularly (whenever necessary or
before releases or by time interval) and watched a bit. Someone has to
decide which parts are ready to get moved.

> So, what does the management mean in practice? Should Lazarus be
> managed differently from how it is managed now?

No,the management is mostly fine as is. It it's only sort of "hidden" or
not easy to step in for newcomers. I think the missing beginners page
could do a lot, it can tell people shortly how things work and that
problem are best handled on the mailing lists (although it is sometimes
challenging to folow all that traffic ;). This beginners guide should be
visible not only on the wikis starting page but on the home page of the
project, at least as a link to the wiki.

Standard project management procedures only apply partly here. There is
no ressource planning, no strict time schedules, no accounting, to name
a few. And the project is not as big as ohter open source project
requiring formal procedure for anything to be done. As long as the
mailing lists can handle the amount of questions they are perfect for
handling most things. And the persons answering question do an excellent
job in answering, fixing problem in code or with web servers, very
quickly as we all now.

Since those problems pop up from time to time it may be a good source of
information to scan the mailing lists archive for the type of requests
from newbies to get the most wanted issues.

-- 
Marc Santhoff <M.Santhoff at web.de>