Re: git todo-list ?

Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com> writes:

I wouldn't dismiss it that fast. Replacing it with a notice that says the community is looking for a volunteer (or group of volunteers) who is willing to invest the time and effort to keep it up to date would be very good, though.

I miss "kernel traffic" and its cousen "git traffic" (which we saw only the first issue of, unfortunately). FWIW, until very recently, your "niggles" list $gmane/34244 was still kept in my box as 'ticked'. I recently unticked it as many of the issues there have been resolved and some have been made irrelevant.

If somebody sent such a list (maybe starting with only his own "niggles" list) and posted it to the list bi-weekly (with a good maintenance -- removing stale items from such a list is often much more important than adding newly raised issues to keep it useful), that would be a great contribution to the community. Interested people could even take turns to be the list editor.

I would say that is true for almost any project in the free software world. Also I would not state b. with word "guru". You either do it yourself, or find people who can, and tempt them do it for you. And "people who can" do not have to be necessarily gurus.

A good strategy to do b. is to demonstrate the need in concrete terms; post your attempt at the problem, even though it may not be elegant or inclusion quality, and explain what you are trying to achieve. Code, sample output, or even imaginary transcript is worth thousands words to explain what you are trying to do. Then, describe how much your attempt solves and what you find lacking in it (iow what more is needed in the output from your failed attempt to make you happy).

This has three possible outcome. (1) Somebody might do it; (2) Somebody might do it better than you imagined possible; (3) Somebody might explain why it is a bad approach to do the way you described, make you realize that what you initially thought was "the need" was merely one possible approach (and not optimal one) to solve a higher level problem you were ultimately trying to solve, and teach you a better way to solve that problem.

On the other hand, a poor strategy is to say things like these:

 - Other system X does it.

   (If you are content with system X, we are happy.  We won't
   force you to use git and suffer from the lack of that
   feature.)

 - You would want more users, wouldn't you?

   (Not necessarily.  World domination might happen as a side
   effect of being the best system in the field, but it is not
   our goal by itself.)

 - Our project cannot use git unless you have this and that.

   (Tough.)       

without saying "if we had this, git can be more useful in such and such scenario, and it is applicable not only this situation but here and there."