Re: [Ekiga-devel-list] Reorganizing things

[yannick <sevmek free fr>]

Damien Sandras a écrit :
> Nobody ?
> 

Sorry, it is a bad timefor me as my work is starting again; I'll have
fewer spare time for 2 or 3 weeks...

> (Except Peter: thanks for the nice words and help offer!)
> 
> Le lundi 31 août 2009 à 19:58 +0200, Damien Sandras a écrit :
>> Dear all,
>>
>> It appears clearly that since a few months I can dedicate less time than
>> before to Ekiga. During the first 5 to 6 years of the project, I was
>> dedicating all evenings to the project and nearly all week-ends, fully.
>>
>> It is now impossible for me to continue developing at that pace. If we
>> organize things in a clever way, I think it will not be a problem. My
>> intensive work probably hide a few organization problems.
>>
>> We now have a few very high quality contributors: they help the project
>> move forward will less "devotion" from myself.
>>
>> The purpose of this e-mail is to identify the areas where people can
>> help and how we should work. But before identifying those areas, I would
>> stress on the fact that my wish is to release often, but with only a
>> limited set of new features, that are well-tested. We have seen in the
>> past that we had worked on many new features, half-finished, and that it
>> was hard to stabilize them before doing a release. I don't want this to
>> happen.

I like this idea too, 3.0 was a pain to release. Beside, network (TCP
support) and the audio part of Ekiga (e.g. pulse audio) needs some new
features quickly.

>>
>> Here is the list of tasks I have identified.
>>
>> a) Reorganization of the WEB service (ekiga.org + ekiga.net) : it is a
>> much required work to give the feeling of a united and well thought
>> service. We need designers for that task.

I'll do some work for it soon. first, I'll start with a theme maching
current ekiga.org for drupal.

>>
>> b) Reorganization of ekiga.net services : more stability, more features.
>> I can take care of that myself, but external help would be great.
>>
>> c) Accounts support : we receive many e-mails of people wanting to
>> remove their account or wondering why it does not work. They are not
>> answered anymore. We need somebody to help with that.

Indeed, I do not really respond to all requests, still it is also in my
plan to improve ekiga.net with deletion of account and a new password
design (design is done, implementation is the next step)

>>
>> d) Development : we need more developers. Eugen is handling bugzilla and
>> patches. Julien is coding a lot. Michael is working on the WIN32 version
>> which is nearly as good as the Linux version. More people like all of
>> them should join the Ekiga project and help improving it.
>>
>> e) Documentation : Yannick has been managing this since a few years
>> nearly alone. Help is welcome.

I'll do some work for it too, but ekiga.net and ekiga.org reshaping will
come first. I think our website is the best meeting point for users and
devs willing to help. It really needs improvements.

>>
>> f) User Support : We all do user support at some level. When we do user
>> support, it means we can not dedicate time to our other tasks to make
>> the software progress. More people working on user support should join.
>> Perhaps a forum instead of a mailing list would be more modern and ease
>> the task.

As ekiga does not report errors in a very distinctive way, support is
hard to do for people which cannot read a -d 4. A forum will not fix
that. I think some dev is needed in ekiga (e.g. a debug console).

>>
>> Did I forget something? 
>>

I will add testing: testing before a release, testing interoperability,
and testing new features in the master tree in coordination with devs in
charge.

Best regards,
Yannick

>> Feel free to comment...