That's a very good idea. I'm looking forward in to it.
Still waiting for svn access, i hope Thomas will add me soon. There are some tickets I want to close, and reorganize roadmap. I've started some, but I think we need to discuss it in a group, what we want to put to 0.1-release.
-- Best regards Tom
Dnia Thu, 21 Dec 2006 09:29:39 -0600 napisales[as]:
I am all for a scheduled push for contributors to meet online to work on the tickets for the next release. Perhaps we can schedule something for January for all of us to meet online using a IM client which supports a group chat. (Skype, GTalk, etc)
Thomas, you could walk us through your plans and each of us could volunteer to work on specific tickets. Perhaps after a few of these sessions we will be past the next release.
Brennan
On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 15:17:46 +0100, Michael Bueker m.bueker@berlin.de> wrote:
I couldn't have said it any better - I totally agree. I like the way how roundcube is developing very much, we are making slow but steady progress.
If you think we need a "cleanup offensive" of the code or the ticket system, just call for it, maybe lay out some rules (like, which tickets to keep, delete or tag in which way) and I'll be happy to help out.
Or a drive to write up some more/revised documentation or vamp up the wiki
- I'm sure that if you announced a major task, there will be enough people
willing to help out.
Cheers, ~Mik
-- Brennan Stehling Offwhite.net LLC brennan@offwhite.net
why not have an irc channels on like freenode or something to allow devs to talk and experienced users help new commers.
Tomasz Pajor wrote:
That's a very good idea. I'm looking forward in to it.
Still waiting for svn access, i hope Thomas will add me soon. There are some tickets I want to close, and reorganize roadmap. I've started some, but I think we need to discuss it in a group, what we want to put to 0.1-release.
-- Best regards Tom
Dnia Thu, 21 Dec 2006 09:29:39 -0600 napisales[as]:
I am all for a scheduled push for contributors to meet online to work on the tickets for the next release. Perhaps we can schedule something for January for all of us to meet online using a IM client which supports a group chat. (Skype, GTalk, etc)
Thomas, you could walk us through your plans and each of us could volunteer to work on specific tickets. Perhaps after a few of these sessions we will be past the next release.
Brennan
On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 15:17:46 +0100, Michael Bueker m.bueker@berlin.de> wrote:
I couldn't have said it any better - I totally agree. I like the way how roundcube is developing very much, we are making slow but steady progress.
If you think we need a "cleanup offensive" of the code or the ticket system, just call for it, maybe lay out some rules (like, which tickets to keep, delete or tag in which way) and I'll be happy to help out.
Or a drive to write up some more/revised documentation or vamp up the wiki
- I'm sure that if you announced a major task, there will be enough people
willing to help out.
Cheers, ~Mik
-- Brennan Stehling Offwhite.net LLC brennan@offwhite.net
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Chris Richardson wrote:
why not have an irc channels on like freenode or something to allow devs to talk and experienced users help new commers.
There is one, on Freenode, but there's too little activity for it to be useful to people with questions.
~Mik
I never knew that or I would have been there. I find irc is a vauleable resource as a user and support for all software we use. also there is no topic in here which might make people not sure if they are in the correct place.
Michael Bueker wrote:
Chris Richardson wrote:
why not have an irc channels on like freenode or something to allow devs to talk and experienced users help new commers.
There is one, on Freenode, but there's too little activity for it to be useful to people with questions.
~Mik
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Michael Bueker wrote:
Chris Richardson wrote:
why not have an irc channels on like freenode or something to allow devs to talk and experienced users help new commers.
There is one, on Freenode, but there's too little activity for it to be useful to people with questions.
~Mik
Isn't that what a forum is for?
a forum isnt realy ment for real time discussions.
Brett Patterson wrote:
Michael Bueker wrote:
Chris Richardson wrote:
why not have an irc channels on like freenode or something to allow devs to talk and experienced users help new commers.
There is one, on Freenode, but there's too little activity for it to be useful to people with questions.
~Mik
Isn't that what a forum is for?
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I would stick with the web forum so the thread is archived from the start. I have yet to find an IRC client which really works well. You really have to sit and watch the window for incoming messages directed at you so that you send all your waiting instead of coding. And you have to filter out multiple discussions happening at the same time. At least a forum you have isolated threads.
For an interactive real-time group discussion I strongly suggest Skype as it runs on Windows, MacOS X and Linux and is completely free. It also has some useful functions, especially with Unyte (also free) for screen sharing. You can really help someone out when you can see their screen as you talk with them. Unyte works as a Java applet in the web browser so that is also cross-platform.
http://www.skype.com/ http://www.unyte.net/
Skype supports a group chat mode, text and voice, so that we could arrange for a team meeting and have Thomas delegate the work in that way. A good way to do that is have everyone mute their mics and just have Thomas talk. As people want to volunteer they can send an IM in the group chat.
The free version of Unyte does 1 to 1 sharing but the Unyte+ version (paid version) can do 1 to 25 people, so that may be worth the investment for the project. At $30/year I would be happy to pay for Thomas to have access to do that. Perhaps we could have monthly group meetings.
And using the Wink program, Thomas could record his end of the discussion and save out the meeting as a video which others can watch if they could not make the meeting.
http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
These 3 tools will really improve the communication and help new contributors get going. I could even produce a recording of the install process. I would actually like to have Thomas walk me through a fresh install in an interview style and publish that on the website as documentation.
Brennan
On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 13:09:09 -0500, Brett Patterson brett@bpatterson.net wrote:
Michael Bueker wrote:
Chris Richardson wrote:
why not have an irc channels on like freenode or something to allow devs to talk and experienced users help new commers.
There is one, on Freenode, but there's too little activity for it to be useful to people with questions.
~Mik
Isn't that what a forum is for?
For an interactive real-time group discussion I strongly suggest Skype as it runs on Windows, MacOS X and Linux and is completely free. It also has some useful functions, especially with Unyte (also free) for screen sharing. You can really help someone out when you can see their screen as you talk with them. Unyte works as a Java applet in the web browser so that is also cross-platform.
I administer a Jabber server, if you like I could host a Jabber conference room for Roundcube developers. A friend of mine has written a jabber to IRC gateway, which means participants could use either Jabber or IRC and talk to each other.
Just throwing that out there,
Doug
Brennan Stehling wrote:
I would stick with the web forum so the thread is archived from the start. I have yet to find an IRC client which really works well. You really have to sit and watch the window for incoming messages directed at you so that you send all your waiting instead of coding. And you have to filter out multiple discussions happening at the same time. At least a forum you have isolated threads.
For an interactive real-time group discussion I strongly suggest Skype as it runs on Windows, MacOS X and Linux and is completely free. It also has some useful functions, especially with Unyte (also free) for screen sharing. You can really help someone out when you can see their screen as you talk with them. Unyte works as a Java applet in the web browser so that is also cross-platform.
The problem for me (and maybe some others) is that it's hard to find a large chunk of time to devote to an audio/video meeting when we would all be available. It's such a geographically diverse group that just organizing a time will probably prove to be difficult. It is much easier to squeeze in a text chat because it doesn't necessarily have to take 100% of your attention, and it can perhaps be done on work time, etc.
In addition to that, what time I have tends to be at home in the evenings, but I also have don't have a home office and I have a 2-year old son who likes to talk and makes audio communication (even on the phone) an interesting task. :)
On another subject: It seems we have a lot of sysadmins offering time, so we might even be able to dedicate certain ones to certain setups ("specialists" I guess they could be called). For example, it would be best to have an admin who uses Dovecot on a daily basis to be responsible for its testing. They would be more likely to know quirks and what might be a configuration issue.
If someone reports a problem, a specialist could test, attempt to reproduce the problem, and gather more information before the ticket is passed on to an actual developer.
Just another idea...
Hello everybody
First I'd like to thank you all for the strong support offered to the project and especially in this thread. I didn't want to make things bad but as the project grows I think it's a good time to take a break and look around to see what we have brought up so far and where we would like to go.
As when RoundCube started, it was just a tool for my personal needs and it worked well on my Mac box with MySQL and the IMAP server of my choice. But once it got a bit more popular requests came to support Postgres, SQLite, MSSQL and I had to learn that there are other IMAP servers with different behaviors as well as ISO-8859-1 does not cover all the world. Last but not least I learned a lot about security and of course multipart mails :-) It is also very interesting for me to chat with lots of people who are interested in RoundCube and who have problems or requests. But it suddenly started to overcharge me and then I'm unhappy because I cannot serve all people's wishes and because I'm stuck with answering mails and checking new tickets and not having the time to code.
And here we are now, 1.5 years after the creation of the sourceforge project. As Tor Bendiksen stated correctly, I really believe in the success of RoundCube and I'll do my very best to lead the project into a bright future. Thanks a lot to Jim who tidied up the tickets, this is something very important and to be honest, I really lost control over the numerous incoming tickets.
I like the suggestions of Brennan and others about some more hierarchy in the project organization and also real-time chats/talks could improve the project management. Personally I prefer Skype because that's what runs all the time when my computer is on. I'm not sure about the possibility to get all together at the same time because we're all spread over several continents but I'll try to make an appointment somewhere in January. Until then I'd like to get together a list of active contributers who are willing to spend a certain amount of time per month on the project. Not only developers but sys admins who can do testing and reporting. It's important to assigns certain responsibilities to these persons in order to have the tickets assigned correctly. I always told the devs to assigns tickets to their users but this doesn't work as expected...
To start with, I opened a new wiki page http://trac.roundcube.net/trac.cgi/wiki/Dev_Members where you guys please register yourself with your preferred occupation. I hot this will help us delegate tasks to the right person.
For the future steps and upcoming releases I also like Brennan's suggestion to keep a branch for every public release in order to maintain bugfixes and security fixes on only in trunk. It's up to me to organize the repository accordingly.
I also promise to write some development/coding guidelines and to put together some basic description about the structure and functionality of RoundCube. This is certainly necessary for new developers to get started.
As you could see on the mailing list, there have been many posts with patches introducing new features like message filtering and more. Nice work but for now, we should concentrate on bugfixing because new features mostly cause new bugs. Looks like we should publish a new beta (would be 0.1-beta3 then) with the latest fixes but without new features like TinyMCE and preview pane. Those are not well tested and still have some issues. My next task will be the re-write of the address book and to get the LDAP access back into the trunk.
Finally I'd like to thank you all for your support, your contribution and your belief in RoundCube!
With my best regards
Thomas
Thomas Bruederli wrote:
It is also very interesting for me to chat with lots of people who are interested in RoundCube and who have problems or requests. But it suddenly started to overcharge me and then I'm unhappy because I cannot serve all people's wishes and because I'm stuck with answering mails and checking new tickets and not having the time to code.
One thing it always helps to remember: no matter what you do, you can't please everybody. That's a good way to induce stress in a hurry!
Seems like the answering mail could be helped out by moving any support requests, feature requests and the like to a general account somewhere that multiple people could have a login for. I'm not sure the volume is high enough to warrant something such as OTRS (http://otrs.org/) but having a few people who can answer the mail can help. Alternately, you could stop taking such requests via e-mail, and encourage people to post such things in the forum or mailing lists where they can be handled by the community at large.
As for the tickets, that can be a chore in itself, but if we had some sort of "first tier" support that can take the tickets and filter out the invalid/dupes/whatever, before they get to someone like you, that should really ease the burden.
As this thread has shown, if you need help with something there are a bunch of people willing to volunteer!
And here we are now, 1.5 years after the creation of the sourceforge project. As Tor Bendiksen stated correctly, I really believe in the success of RoundCube and I'll do my very best to lead the project into a bright future.
Hear, hear!
Thanks a lot to Jim who tidied up the tickets, this is something very important and to be honest, I really lost control over the numerous incoming tickets.
Not a problem, I'm happy to help. I'm also sure there are a lot more dupes and invalid tickets out there I just haven't gotten through them all or I didn't have a setup to attempt to reproduce the problem. Some new ones may have slipped by, but there are also a lot of really old tickets out there that may even have been fixed, but the original person who opened the ticket is nowhere to be found for an update.
Until then I'd like to get together a list of active contributers who are willing to spend a certain amount of time per month on the project. Not only developers but sys admins who can do testing and reporting. It's important to assigns certain responsibilities to these persons in order to have the tickets assigned correctly. I always told the devs to assigns tickets to their users but this doesn't work as expected...
Count me in. I can easily spend a few hours a month at least with helping out monitoring incoming tickets, testing and reporting, and some user support. On rare occasions I could probably help with coding, depending on the problem.
I also promise to write some development/coding guidelines and to put together some basic description about the structure and functionality of RoundCube. This is certainly necessary for new developers to get started.
Definitely a good idea, it would help out a lot for those willing to spend a little time on code but who aren't familiar with the codebase (such as me.)
Finally I'd like to thank you all for your support, your contribution and your belief in RoundCube!
You're welcome!
Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays/Happy New Year/etc :)
Jim
Seems like the answering mail could be helped out by moving any support requests, feature requests and the like to a general account somewhere that multiple people could have a login for. I'm not sure the volume is high enough to warrant something such as OTRS (http://otrs.org/) but having a few people who can answer the mail can help. Alternately, you could stop taking such requests via e-mail, and encourage people to post such things in the forum or mailing lists where they can be handled by the community at large.
Jim and Thomas,
Encouraging the use of the forums is a good way to go. Unfortunately people are likely discouraged because you have to create an account to post their bug report or feature request. (Also the forums are currently offline)
What I would do is this...
- Requests are sent to support@roundcube.net
- Incoming messages are automatically posted to the forums as new threads (perhaps in a Developer only section)
- As testers/developers we can subscribe to email notifications for this forum section (or perhaps get an RSS feed)
Then we can get notifications for the incoming issues and discuss it on the forum. I like the RSS option because I can subscribe to it with my RSS reader of choice or as a Live Bookmark in FireFox. I already have more than enough messages in my inbox and would rather use RSS or this sort of communication.
Brennan Stehling wrote:
Seems like the answering mail could be helped out by moving any support requests, feature requests and the like to a general account somewhere that multiple people could have a login for. I'm not sure the volume is high enough to warrant something such as OTRS (http://otrs.org/) but having a few people who can answer the mail can help. Alternately, you could stop taking such requests via e-mail, and encourage people to post such things in the forum or mailing lists where they can be handled by the community at large.
Jim and Thomas,
Encouraging the use of the forums is a good way to go. Unfortunately people are likely discouraged because you have to create an account to post their bug report or feature request. (Also the forums are currently offline)
Sorry about that. Had to run from MD to NC and back. I fixed it.
Certain tables keep crashing. I plan on having that issue resolved in
January with a new release of the forum.
What I would do is this...
- Requests are sent to support@roundcube.net
- Incoming messages are automatically posted to the forums as new threads (perhaps in a Developer only section)
- As testers/developers we can subscribe to email notifications for this forum section (or perhaps get an RSS feed)
That would be pretty easy. One thing I'd like to maybe add is that support@roundcube.net gets forwarded to dev-incoming@roundcubeforum.net so I can do the parsing and such on my side. Makes things much easier for me to keep up on.
Then we can get notifications for the incoming issues and discuss it on the forum. I like the RSS option because I can subscribe to it with my RSS reader of choice or as a Live Bookmark in FireFox. I already have more than enough messages in my inbox and would rather use RSS or this sort of communication.
As for the RSS / Live Bookmark feed, SMF (the software we're using for the forum) has this built-in and I've got it enabled.
Thomas knows my plans for the forum. If we can decide whether we want a
development board or not, I can set one up at dev.roundcubeforum.net.
I'd close registration so that you'd have to email me thus restricting
that board to devs only (or I can open it up, y'alls choice). Lots of
plans, hopefully the "new" forum will be up and running by late January.
I will divulge this: -- A new theme is coming, one that is more Roundcube -- More integration with Trac is coming too ;)
~Brett
-
Brennan Stehling -
Brett Patterson -
Chris Richardson -
Doug Mandell -
Jim Pingle -
Michael Bueker -
Thomas Bruederli -
Tomasz Pajor