Re: GNU Guix 1.4.0 released

[indieterminacy <indieterminacy@libre.brussels>]

On 03-01-2023 10:08, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> skribis:
> 
>> Congrats, and yay!  It's a hell of a release! :-) Let's try to make 
>> more
>> punctual ones from now on, and also try to lower the amount of manual
>> labor producing one incurs (by streamlining the process), as speaking
>> for me, this was one of the reasons I kept putting it back.
> 
> Definitely, let’s see how we can make the process smoother.
> 
> In my experience though, a lot of the work is coordination: keeping
> track of what needs to be done, open bugs, calling for testing, etc.
> 
> I think we should start thinking about the next release, forming a
> small release team, and I’ll be happy to mentor!
> 
> Thanks,
> Ludo’.

Out of curiosity, have you ever approached developing a release from the 
perspective of doing documentation first?

For example, test driven approaches like BDD or TDD have allowed the 
expectations and examples to be worked out first and the the 
implementation built to form it.

More practically, theres a recent thread concerning different approaches 
and priorities concerning syntaxes. Also, if during 1.5 there were 
articulations regarding how existing behaviour does not conform with 
desired behaviour then it may become easier to divide up tasks into 
chunks for teams or individuals to work on.

With idealised documentation in place this could provide a point of 
motivation for developers and avoid any fatigue once the solution is in 
place as the /drudgery/ of explaining how things work and how they can 
be used had been worked out in advance.

In any case, while I cannot comment on the tactics within the OpenBSD 
community I always considered it a noble thing that no improvements we 
put into their OS until the features were correctly documented.

Thanks everybody with your work on 1.4.0 !

-- 
Jonathan McHugh
indieterminacy@libre.brussels