D project management for better growth and longevity

[js.mdnq]

On Thursday, 21 February 2013 at 15:12:40 UTC, Samuel Lampa wrote:
> I think I might see something of what you mean.
>
> For example, the highly successful (not the least in terms of 
> ecosystem) Drupal project, has many subprojects, for improving 
> things around Drupal (specific set of modules/plug-ins/project 
> infrastructure and many other things), which are organised as 
> groups on their group-discussion site (powered by the "organic 
> groups" drupal module, which is highly suited for this kind of 
> self-organizing groups).
>
> http://groups.drupal.org/
>
> (Anyone can start a new group, to facilitate community 
> self-organization)
>
> You mentioned the main criteria, to get something such to work. 
> which not many systems have, namely making it easy to keeping 
> track of who is interested/involved in what, in order to 
> efficiently interact with the relevant sub-group of the 
> community.
>
> What D has in this area, seems to be the DSource website, and 
> forums:
> http://www.dsource.org/forums/
>
> I don't know how it works out though (haven't participated), 
> but it turns out that the above feature is missing: It's not 
> easy to keep track of who are involved (subscribe to) in 
> projects. Also, it could maybe be made easier to find for 
> newcomers?
>
> (Maybe Drupal with "organic groups" could be used to set up an 
> improved group discussion site? :) )
>
> Cheers
> // Samuel

The groups do not seem to be hierarchical based but just a linear 
collection. Any method that just uses a linear collection is bad 
because the project can't be logically divided into smaller 
chunks in a uniform way(in a way that is uniform across the 
software and logical to the user). Essentially the drupal groups, 
as I have just looked, is a collection of projects in a list but 
each project is not a collection of sub-projects and there is no 
commonality between all the stuff I talked about before(forums, 
users/collaboration, etc...)

I am not sure about gerrit as I've just looked at it but best I 
can tell it is just a simple review tool. What I am talking about 
would have code review built in but the main thing is the 
hierarchical design which allows projects to be divide into 
sub-projects and tasks which users can dig down to what they want 
to contribute at(from the overview design of a project to a 
single line of code) but there is a logical separation as 
children can't (necessarily) see parents(although you will need 
the ability to have non-parental dependencies).

I think the most important aspects is the hierarchical nature and 
the commonality of nodes(All being project based and having the 
exact same interface for the user: project forums, collaboration 
tools, overview of child projects, etc).

The hierarchy not only allows one to quickly find any sub-project 
and project area(e.g., it categorizes projects) but also allows 
one to sort of "build" the whole D structure using scripts on 
each node(maintained by the maintainers of that node). Each node 
into the tree will push it's changes up to the parent node and 
the maintainers can accept those pushes which will chain finally 
to the root node which will be the current snapshot of D.

The easy of use comes from the tools and user interface(I'm 
thinking more of a like project tree diagram.

Test builds could be carried out by individuals relatively easily 
by "downloading" the whole D hierarchy(for arguments sake). If 
I'm trying to implement a GC for D I could write my own(or fork 
another) and then build D using that GC and it will be integrated 
in automatically(or easily, unless errors). One wouldn't need to 
compile all of D, only what changed, which would be only your 
project, so it would be quick). Of course, if all you are working 
on effects the D compiler you could terminate the build process 
earlier(for slightly quicker results and possibly smaller 
footprint on the download).