[MOBY-dev] RFC's in MOBY

[Frank Gibbons]

Martin,

At 11:57 AM 8/24/2005, moby-dev-request at portal.open-bio.org wrote:
>This is *a* solution (based on my experiences from the OMG process):
>
>    1) Anybody can make a suggestion to make a change in API (we can call
>it RFP - request for proposal, or RFC - request for comments, or
>whatever). An example of such thing are the proposals from Oswaldo and his
>collegues (eventhough I would not expect to have it always so perfectly
>written :-)). Important is that it must *say* this is a RFP/RFC, not just
>a wish in email. We will keep a place for it (bugzilla has wishlists?).

Thanks for that suggestion - that sounds very sensible to me. As to whether 
Bugzilla has wishlists, I can't find them. (I hold the distinction of being 
the first - and to my knowledge, only - user of MOBY's Bugzilla set up.) 
Still, I guess we could overload the definition of 'bug' as meaning 
anything that needs attention. SourceForge has trackers that can 
differentiate between at least these four categories: bugs, 
support-requests, patches, and features requests. I'm sure there are good 
reasons why it makes sense to put MOBY on open-bio, rather than 
SourceForge. Is there any way we (and by 'we' I mean whoever runs open-bio 
:) could 'upgrade' the features offered by bugzilla there, to distinguish 
between those different kinds of requests? It would also help if the link 
to bugzilla got moved to a more prominent position on the MOBY home page.

I really agree with Martin, that we need to adopt a more formalized (but 
not necessarily formal) approach to developing MOBY, because it's becoming 
bigger, and more widely used. The unformalized communication based on email 
doesn't scale terribly well:

* there's poor differentiation between feature requests and bugs; and no 
definitive process for making decisions on either one;
* there's no permanent record of decisions taken (except by searching the 
mail archives - good luck with that!);
* although it's possible to announce future directions for development, 
they soon get lost in the archives, since they're not tagged as such.

There are already powerful tools to help manage distributed software 
development, and I'd like to see us use them more. Using them would not 
only be good for our internal development, it would be good for our image, 
because it would look like we know what we're doing, giving newbies more 
confidence to join.

Just my opinion,

-Frank

PhD, Computational Biologist,
Harvard Medical School BCMP/SGM-322, 250 Longwood Ave, Boston MA 02115, USA.
Tel: 617-432-3555       Fax: 
617-432-3557       http://llama.med.harvard.edu/~fgibbons