Re: Luaforge redesign, data crisis, project management, and a partridge in a pear tree..

[Fabio Mascarenhas <mascarenhas@...>]

I was one of the five present (counting Jim) on the thursday chat. Far
from being a secret meeting, this was just an informal chat in a rainy
afternoon, and I am amazed at the level of controversy it has caused,
but I guess this is always a risk with communicating online. If we
didn't send an email to the list right after our chat it was because
Jim was the one taking notes, not for any desire to keep things
secret.

Now that LuaForge is mostly back up (and I am in favor of not fixing
non-anonymous CVS access, as an incentive for everyone that is still
keeping source trees there to move it ASAP; git cvsimport is your
friend) we can all take a deep breath and take our time.

--
Fabio Mascarenhas


On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 6:16 PM, Jim Whitehead II <jnwhiteh@gmail.com> wrote:
> I sincerely apologize for the new topic, but I want to ensure that
> anyone who might have muted the otherthread (it's up to 97 responses
> at this point) gets a chance to read this.  Fernando just raised some
> points in his last response that I wanted to clarify.
>
> When the Luaforge server first went down, we entered crisis mode.  It
> was unclear how long it would take to get the site back up and running
> and it showed the entire community a deficiency in our infrastructure.
>  As a community, we have come to rely quite heavily on the site, as
> evidenced by the periodic downtime this year and the most recent
> crash.  Thanks to the Andre, Alessandro and everyone else involved,
> portions of the website have been restored.  As far as I am aware the
> faulty hardware has been replaced and while in the short term we need
> a better backup solution, I wouldn't consider us to be in crisis mode
> any longer.  We're no more aware of the possibility of a crash than we
> were the last time Andre warned us, it's just fresher in our minds!
>
> Secondly, although my actions over the past four days may have
> indicated otherwise, I am not (at this point) assuming the role of
> project manager for our discussion and redesign.  I happened to be the
> one who took notes at our meeting in Rio and when I landed in the U.S,
> I didn't see any responses from those people, so I took the initiative
> and tried to corral everyone into a more appropriate location.
>
> This long term project is less than a week old, and I think it's a bit
> premature to be deciding what role everyone will have in the project.
> There are people who might not have been reading the mailing list this
> week that might like to be involved, for example.  I'm more than happy
> to act as project manager, but if that prevents other people from
> being involved in the project due to interpersonal conflicts, I am
> happy to step aside and let someone else lead while still helping the
> project in any way I can.
>
> For right now, I just ask that we all take a step back and breathe.
> Whatever the complexity of the solution, it's going to take time and a
> number of iterations in order to get to a point where it's usable as a
> replacement for G-Forge.  Starting tomorrow (so I have a remote chance
> of enjoying the remainder of my weekend), I'm going to try and start
> an architectural/design discussion somewhere.  Then we will have a
> concrete place to list precisely what we want on the site, without
> getting bogged down with the specific details of implementation.
>
> I'd like to (again) extend an invitation for anyone who is interested
> in the future development of <insert site name here> to join the
> luaforge-development mailing list [1] at Google Groups.  Of course any
> release announcements or preliminary designs may be made here, we
> should try to restrict active discussion about the site to the mailing
> list.
>
> Thanks for your patience with me,
>
> - Jim
>
> [1]: http://groups.google.com/group/luaforge-development.
>