[Zope-dev] (SHOUT) NOTIFICATION!!!!

[Chris Withers]

Paul Everitt wrote:
> 
> You're going to love the irony on this, but there's a proposal in the
> fishbowl on this:
> 
>    http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/FishbowlManageability
> 
> ...and of course, nobody knows the proposal is there.

hehe, read Casey's response, it makes the same comment. I find that ironic ;-)

> > 2. We could by a tool that does this kind of thing. Where would we get such a beast from? how much would it cost/ who
> > would fit the bill?
> 
> ...and what would be the transition costs?

Good point... but you get these with any of the three options...


> Hmm, I don't really see Bugzilla and the Fishbowl overlapping.  Perhaps
> with the Collector, though.  However, I don't think the real issues
> involved are related to choice of tool.

I think this is the problem. There shouldn't be a seperate 'fishbowl' and
'collector'.
They're doing the same thing; helping Zope get better. Why split that effort?

Sure, there should be some differentiation between bug fixes and new
developments, but, take the User API changes; was that fixing a bug (badly
broken user folder interface) or a new development ('new' user folder api)?

I think the difference is small enough that is deserves to be a field on a form
rather than a totally separate process.

Think about it, both collector and fishbowl 'issues' need:
- discussion
- consenus
- documentation
- development
- notification of the appropriate people.

What differs between them?

> It's been mentioning that ZC doesn't pay attention, so proposals go in
> and nothing happens.  Bugzilla won't fix that problem.  

Now here I really gotta shout loud 'cos I've made this point so many times I'm
wondering how I can say it so it gets through...
(Paul, here, have some earplugs ;-)

Notification, which bugzilla offers, MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE!!!!!!
Email notification is good enough, if I want that to beep my cellphone, I just
send it to me genie.co.uk email address...

None of us have time to read irrelevent web pages, which, for any given person,
90% of the fishbowl probably will be. Furthermore, why should we need to read
anything more than what's changed (the last comment added, the status of the
issue changing, etc)

bugzilla appears to do all this quite well from an outsiders point of view. Of
course, it may be a complete pig, in which case we will need to produce
something. However, just to say it again, email notification of as little (but
not too little!) information is the key.

If you need me to prove this, let me knwo and I'll get out my thesis writing pen
;-)

> I'll add that
> the community doesn't always pay good enough attention.  

The lack of appropriate notification mechanisms rather than any deliberate or
malicious reasons would be my guess for any lack of attention, both within ZC
and the community...

> Sure, people
> will say "when will we have versioning" or "when will we have web
> services".  We go off, make a proposal, and email zope-dev.  No feedback
> -- I take that back, each has received one response, whether by wiki
> comment, mailing list response, or private response.

Wonder if the authors new the comments had been posted? I wonder if the posters
had known the author had replied?

> This isn't a good track record.  Brian produced 35 pages worth of
> almost-flawless docs on web services to go with his code.  But no
> comments.  And he's doing this on his own time.  So let's remember that
> this is a two-way street.

Indeed. I read Brian's proposal when he first announced it. It wasn't quite
finished or relevant to me, so I thought "I'll come back later". of course, next
day I'd completely forgotten about it (and when I did remembe about it, I
couldn't easily find it with resoting to mailing list archives and the like...)
and so never came back. Now, if I could have ticked a box saying "email me when
such and such happens" then I, or other people here at NIP who are dealing with
Web Services in a big way ,would have got involved as soon as appropriate...

> IMO, Bugzilla won't fix these kinds of problems.  I think the first step
> is to refine what we have while finding better ways to work together.

Well, okay, don't use bugzilla. But dump wiki, it's not sutructured enough. You
want bite sized bits of information, ruthlessly and sem-automatically
categorized, with fine-grained control of the notification your receive.

Now, that would spark a community into action :-)

cheers,

Chris

PS: Loosing the dichotomy of collector and fishbowl would be another major
step... it's all project management anyway ;-)