Hi Ken -

Sounds almost like what I was saying but you still insist on 
bottle-necking it through a "harvester". Why is that? Do you feel you 
need a harvester for anything Avi or any of the guys working on 
Monticello do? On VMMaker? If not, why do you feel you need a harvester 
for, say, the FFI, the Graphics subsystem, Morphic, Sound, or 
Networking? Who, if not the people working on this part of the system, 
could possibly decide what an appropriate resolution of the issue would 
be? When you have responsible maintainers there is simply no role for a 
harvester per se - there might be some supporting roles (like 
classifying bugs or integration testing) but all of these issues should 
be handled by the people developing the package, not some guy who is in 
control of everything[*]. For some reason even you guys who talk about 
decentralized development and stewarding then like to fall back on total 
centralized control.

[*] Making releases then means that you have someone who is charge of 
integration testing and writes bug reports for the packages in the 
release which get addressed by the people developing that package.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

Ken Causey wrote:
> In my opinion a big (HUGE) step in the direction towards improving this
> situation is developing the Stewarding system where teams take
> responsibility for image categories and packages.  The idea here is that
> for any given class in the system there is a dedicated person (or
> hopefully group) that has accepted reponsibility for it and has
> undertaken to become an expert on it.  We call such a person a Steward
> and the team under him or her a Steward Team.
> 
> The Harvester's job is then reduced whenever an issue appears related to
> this class.  The Steward(s) for the class will handle the issue and come
> to agreement on the appropriate action.  Once agreement has been reached
> they will hand off a complete and ready solution to the Harvesters.  The
> Harvesters then can have confidence in the solution (built up over time
> because they have developed confidence in the Steward(s)) and can give
> it some quick automatic checks and shove it into the update stream
> (whatever form that happens to take).  In time once the Harvesters have
> built up enough confidence in a particular Steward team perhaps that
> team can simply inject fixes directly into the update stream and not
> require any time from the Harvesters.
> 
> Right now Goran and I are spiking the day to day business of Stewarding
> and trying to work out how it will work on the lowest levels.  I really
> hope that by the end of the week I will be able to produce a document
> explaining the concept in detail and what it entails and once more call
> for participation by the community.
> 
> More soon....
> 
> Ken
> 
> On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 09:28 -0700, Chris Muller wrote:
> 
>>I was attempting to stimulate discussion of Stef's concern from a social angle,
>>not so much a technical one.
>>
>>To repeat the question:  Is there a solution that can direct the energy we have
>>in abundance (people creating things and "improving" existing things) toward
>>the tasks that currently consume a the energy of a select few (harvesting these
>>creations and improvements) in a way that gives us everything we have now
>>(community discussion, review, testing, etc.).
>>
>>My lame, hypothetical implementation dream that followed was meant only to
>>provide an illustrative context for this different social approach than what we
>>have now; i.e., distributed harvestation vs. centralized and what are the
>>implications?
>>
>>Stef asked for ideas to make a "self-supporting" process.  Please forgive for a
>>moment that it will be hard to get there.  I am still just trying to clarify
>>where "there" is and hoping to learn something from you guys in the process..
>>
>>Regards,
>>  Chris
>>
>>
>>
>>>Message: 15
>>>Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 23:55:55 +0200
>>>From: Michael Rueger <michael at impara.de>
>>>Subject: Re: Need to do something
>>>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
>>>	<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>>>Message-ID: <434C34EB.5080802 at impara.de>
>>>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>>>
>>>Chris Muller wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Stop pushing them through Mantis or any other external tool.  Instead, we
>>>
>>>write
>>>
>>>>a program that integrates into Squeak that allows anyone to submit directly
>>>>from the alpha image.  These submissions appear on everyones list.  Later
>>>
>>>the
>>>
>>>NIH all over again. Things never seem to be hard to implement, but we 
>>>are having this discussion because people are running out of energy 
>>>harvesting, let alone writing yet another tool for crying out loud...
>>>
>>>We just moved to Mantis because the other approach didn't work...
>>>
>>>
>>>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>>