Re: [Ayatana-dev] Unity Community Contributor plans for 11.10

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 10:57 AM, Jorge O. Castro <jorge@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've just posted this:
> http://ubuntu-news.org/2011/06/07/unity-community-contributor-plans-for-11-10/
>
> and I wanted to get some more detail in for those of you that have
> signed up to help with Unity bugs. First of all, I renamed the the
> bitesize team to be ~unity-community-hackers. This was done out of the
> discussion that we had at UDS to have a team-wide approach to larger
> bugs (like the ones I've outlined in that post). Here's the spec:
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-unity-developer-participation
>
> Jason and I then went through a bunch of bugs that design felt was a
> good target list of backlogs and starting assigning that to the team.
> In hindsight this probably sent you a bunch of bugspam, sorry about
> that. As we speak Jason has been going through these bugs and adding a
> "how to fix this bug" template, here's an example:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/676453
>
> This will hopefully give people a better idea on how to get started,
> and let you get right on track instead of messing around looking for
> code. Andrea asked if he could reuse the template on existing bugs,
> and the answer is absolutely! You'll find the template here:
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnityFilingBugs If you know how to implement
> something, write it down!
>
>
> --
> Jorge Castro
> Canonical Ltd.
> http://twitter.com/castrojo
> Help fix Unity Bitesize Bugs: http://goo.gl/i1WA1
>

First, thanks for doing this! It'll be really awesome for Unity to
become more of a community project than a Canonical one. Hopefully
this can invite some talented people to participate more in the core
experience than in strange indicators-turned-systray-applets ;)

Because of Unity's direct connection to the look and feel of
effectively the entire OS, one thing that jumps at me when I think
about changing / grumbling about something is the question of whether
I am meeting the grand plan for the project, particularly around
little things that matter like animations and writing style. For Natty
there wasn't much of a public-facing design document (lots of bug
reports pointing at canonical.com), which I think hinders the ability
for community members to make truly high quality contributions. Of
course, people are always helpful when asked on the mailing list or on
IRC, but that isn't always ideal. Is there going to be a definitive
resource to get at this type of information, ideally in one place,
during the Oneiric cycle? (Ideally just _the specification_ if there
is one, but even a few bullet points would do).

On a similar note, I particularly like filing bug reports on things
that don't meet specifications (especially with notifications :|),
because I feel even an imperfect design can be awesome if it is
implemented completely. However, I haven't really been able to do that
for Unity. I pretty well just guess, and as well as being limited,
that has the risk of wasting peoples' time and subtly encouraging
change that actually counteracts a solid plan.

--
Dylan McCall