nunit-dev team mailing list archive

["Charlie Poole" <charlie@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

Welcome to the NUnit Developers list. I thought I'd start out
with a note describing the purpose I imagined for this list
as well as the team itself. Since our move to Launchpad is
a work in progress, a lot of it is open to discussion, so
feel free to give some feedback at this point. Once we
have a discussion - or if there is none - I'll create a shorter
statement of purpose to be sent to any new enrollees.

BACKGROUND
There have been several iterations of change in the way
the NUnit project communicates. Most recently, I set up
nunit-discuss as a place for everything. It has covered user
help, best practices, suggested features, internal project
organization, nunit design and implementation issues and
even submittal and review of patches.

Lately, however, I've seen us spend what seems to me to be
too much time focused on technical developer discussion - how
to implement something - rather than on the value of the
feature under discussion - whether we want to implement it.
I wouldn't mind the dev-oriented discussion if it didn't
drive out the user-oriented bit, but it seems that it does.
So, that's one reason for a separate list.

Another reason is that we are re-structuring NUnit from a
single monolithic project to a set of projects. Currently,
we have a framework project and others (the gui for example)
will get set up as soon as that one is under way. I hope that
multiple projects will lead to an increase in participation,
which will lead to an increase in dev-oriented discussion,
another reason for a separate list.

But the biggest reason to have nunit-dev is that it is
the mail list or the nunit-xtp "superproject" - Launchpad
calls it a project group - which I see as the public 
interface to nunit development. It should work no matter
how we decide to structure our projects.

With that said, here is my proposed statement of purpose...

PURPOSE

>>>>>>> This would be posted as our purpose
This list is used for discussions about the development
of the NUnit Extended Testing Platform and its component
projects on Launchpad. 

Topics that are appropriate for discussion here include:

* The design of NUnit, it's component projects and
  the interfaces between them.
* Assignment and status of work on NUnit.
* Scheduling of milestones and releases.
* Discussion of reported bugs when the correct behavior 
  is not clear.
* Proposals for changes and discussions of proposed changes,
  including the implementation of new features.
* Coordinating the review of patches, at least until we 
  define some other mechanism.
* Proposals for new projects under the NUnit umbrella.
* Discussions of responsibility between the different 
  component projects.

Some topics belong elsewhere:

* User support questions are handled on the nunit-discuss list
  or - for some projects - the Launchpad Answers system.
* New feature ideas should first be proposed and discussed in
  a way that gives NUnit users an opportunity to provide feedback.
  (This is currently done on the nunit-discuss list or the 
  NUnit ideatorrent on Sourceforge.)
* Bugs should be reported using the bug-tracking mechanism
  set up for each project.
>>>>>>>>>   End of Purpose Posting


Like I said, this is a draft, so let me know whether
you think it covers what needs to be said.

Charlie