better use of changes.html (Was: Community health)

[David Crossley <cr...@apache.org>]

Ross Gardler wrote:
> David Crossley wrote:
> >We have already suggested to create a "timeline"
> >to help the history. It will take me a long time
> >to get that together, so be patient.
> >
> >The history of how the project came into being
> >is a minor issue. The main issue seems to be
> >recognition of contributions.
> 
> We already have an infrastructure for this. Mark an entry in status.xml 
> as having importance="high" and that entry will be highlighted in the 
> release notes. There is no reason why we can't create a timeline form 
> this as well. Perhaps by allowing a "historic" setting for @importance 
> (possibly needed as "high" is intended to mean important from users 
> perspectives, whereas "historic" is from a dev perspective.

Great idea. Although i reckon that we can try to
do without the "historic" setting. At least we need
to add some missing entries and mark as high.

Anyone who wanted to know the timeline could just
review the listing and discard the superfluous bits.

cd forrest-trunk/site-author
forrest run
http://localhost:8888/releaseNotes_0.8-dev.html
http://localhost:8888/releaseNotes_0.7.html
http://localhost:8888/releaseNotes_0.6.html

We have some work to do. There were surely more
important changes.

> I don't hink there is any need to go over the past history since nobody 
> has asked for it until now. If any individual would like to see their 
> contribution marked as historic they should go over status.xml 
> themselves, I see no reason wy it should fall to David.

We should all review the archives from time-to-time
and add the missing entries to the top-level status.xml
and to the plugins/*/status.xml for the details.
Not just for our own stuff.

The trouble is that it is easy to be side-tracked.
It is actually very rewarding. There is a goldmine
to stumble across. Many ideas that were discussed but
not implemented, yet still relevant. We can add Jira
issues on the way so that we don't lose these gems.

Newcomers to the project can help with this.
While browsing/searching the mail/svn archives, if you
spot an important event that is not listed in status.xml
then send a patch.

-David

Re: better use of changes.html (Was: Community health)

[Tim Williams <wi...@gmail.com>]

On 3/20/06, David Crossley <cr...@apache.org> wrote:
> Another example of how we are not using the changes.html properly.
>
> http://forrest.apache.org/docs_0_80/changes.html#Contributors
>
> This listing implies that only three people have contributed
> to the 0.8-dev ... surely not true.
>
> This discrepancy happens because committers (all of us)
> have not done proper attributions by using the "due-to"
> attribute when adding action items to site-author/status.xml
> or we have completely neglected to add the items.
>
> -David

I'm just realizing that we should be doing this.  I think I'm seeing a
need for a new Forrest Committers Guide as a fairly simple extension
to docs that already exist elsewhere.

--tim

Re: better use of changes.html (Was: Community health)

[David Crossley <cr...@apache.org>]

Another example of how we are not using the changes.html properly.

http://forrest.apache.org/docs_0_80/changes.html#Contributors

This listing implies that only three people have contributed
to the 0.8-dev ... surely not true.

This discrepancy happens because committers (all of us)
have not done proper attributions by using the "due-to"
attribute when adding action items to site-author/status.xml
or we have completely neglected to add the items.

-David