Re: Starting over..

["Roy T. Fielding" <fi...@kiwi.ics.uci.edu>]

Please folks, don't make the same mistake twice.  There is absolutely
no point in setting a date as a deadline for getting something done.
We have no boss, no marketing/sales pressure, no external calendars
that need to be synchronized with suppliers, and no quantifiable
estimate of the rate at which we as volunteers will get things done.
It is therefore wrong to attempt to "manage" this group as if it were
a normal software development effort.

Consider how I was running the Agenda.  We had a list of showstopper
bugs (things that had to be fixed before the next release), a list of
current patches (things that people had completed work on), and a
list of other known bugs that were within the realm of being fixable
before the final release.  I wouldn't start a "countdown" toward a
release until all of the showstopper bugs were fixed and all of the
current patches either applied or rejected.  In other words, the
"deadline" was an identifiable goal that everyone agreed upon --- removing
the important items from the agenda --- and didn't have to be renegotiated
every time a new problem was found or a useful patch was proposed.

That was more than sufficient to motivate a release.  Quite frankly,
I am astonished that people want to push for a release of 1.3b1 when
there has been scant evidence that the current cvs snapshot even
works on NT.  I suggest that a list of goals be written into the
agenda, and that we tarball 1.3b1 as soon as those goals are achieved.

....Roy