DevTalk Structure

[rocksteady]

we need a place to share our thoughts.
Maybe  by moving those interesting topics to one section close to "patches" and "repo", just to be seen by other devs, would help us make best decisions (all together). Suggestions are welcome, but sometimes devs need one private place for new and concrete ideas, without interference of any kind (not even valv talking about sub-forums  ). Then we could introduce an internal voting system (if needed) to decide about the road to take for the upcoming releases.

valv, mozo (and anyone else interested in pushing things forward), if you have any ideas about restructuring the DevTalk category, please let us know. We'll do some minor maintenance soon.

Upon the first version of the forum, the DevTalk category was accessible only to the members of the team (hidden to the public).

[valv]

@RockSteady, am for a private space for devs.
And btw, why not take care of users, by giving every dev one page (or a sub-forum, if u feel generous) to give support to users related to one's branch/code/trunk? what do u think?

[rocksteady]

Generosity was never an issue here valv

The current layout is just a basic skeleton, ever since the repo opened up. We're always looking to make things better, we just want to hear from every member of the team. Things that may fit me may not fit you and vice versa.

 Straight to the chase:

-Giving a page/subforum to every dev can be done really quick as long as a dev wishes to run his work this way. ie you may be happy to have threads for your work open and available to end users, but Kabyl may prefer to release something only when he sees fit and prefer to have feedback only from other devs.

-Making the whole DevTalk subforum available only to members of the board can also be done quickly. That's how we used to do it.

-For quick chat/feedback/shout in private there's always our irc channel too.

So come on guys, let's vote or just bring your ideas, this place is, first and foremost, a dev's playground

Personally, I can't figure how/why some devs afford to waste so much time by half-supporting random bits & pieces in more than one place. I see decent work in one place (say Slice's smc stuff on projectosx, or one of your projects in another forum), why would I open a thread here to integrate my ideas? It will only make end-users ping-pong between forums and us ending up in trying to follow mostly the same feedback/questions in 2 different places.

[valv]

why would I open a thread here to integrate my ideas? It will only make end-users ping-pong between forums and us ending up in trying to follow mostly the same feedback/questions in 2 different places.

Feedback would be then given here and only here (from the devs them selves). This way we centralize support.
I understand the fact, some of us don't have much time or will to give continual support to end-users, but it remains a choice given.
Last, I'd like to precise you that am expressing my thoughts just because you've been asking for 'em. Thus, they are by no means other than suggestions
best wishes.

[rocksteady]

We're probably saying the same thing with different words. It's all about choice yes, some members never left IRC to post a single comment else where. That's why we want to hear each one's take and act accordingly.  I don't know how each member works, but with 20 years of R&D work on my back, I've found that the only way to actually do something consistent is to keep it organized*.

@valv: I've already PMed you, let me know how you prefer your threads/category to be structured. Any other thoughts/ideas, rock on.

Meanwhile, if anyone else has any other ideas, (or wants to follow valv's way) bring 'em on


*: My schedule being what it is I usually hit  long pauses in the osx86 game, leaving me having to catch up with progress. Some time ago, some people would misunderstand/misinterpret "organized" as which forum gets more traffic, more users, post count as a quality indicator and other cute things when in puberty. I'd like to see that kind of mentality getting out of the way so that we can focus on pushing things forward.

[Gringo Vermelho]

I voted no. I know it doesn't mean much since I'm not a dev.

I enjoy stopping by and reading what the devs are doing, the background info, the discussions that lead up to a decision or development of a certain feature, etc. This helps me to understand better how and why things work.

I would miss that whole part of the Hackintosh experience if I didn't have access to this part of the forum. Just looking at the end result, the code itself, is not the same thing, especially for those of us who aren't very good at reading it.

...good reading you again rock.

[rocksteady]

To be honest, I (subliminally) thought that this would be read only by our dev members (I must have kind of stuck to the time when this category was private), and that the voting would take place only between them.

I never thought that it would actually be of such interest to others but your thoughts are both moving & appreciated.

Thank you funky drummer

[r0m30]

OK, my $.02

I think it should be open to the community.  While a LOT of hard work on Chameleon has been put in by the core group of developers, there are bugs/issues that they don't experience.  I can think of two instances of this in my perusal of the forum.  First, I was seeing a lot of issues with win 7 sleep because it is a bully and expects to be installed in the boot partition and so did Chameleon,  I brought this up on the devtalk forum and with some help a fix was found.  The second fix was the 12 bit offsets for the boot loaders, I know this may seems obscure but it did cause me some issues (I'm strange and wanted my Chameleon partition at the END of the disk).  I think if you look at the list of patches applied to any RC update you will see several patches that made it into the mainline that were proposed by non-core devs who just want to help.  Isn't that what we are trying to promote here, a community.

If the devs don't have the bandwidth to follow up on the forum then maybe the mods can read this forum and "promote" the threads that they feel are constructive to a forum that only devs and mods have write access to acting as a filter that would hopefully reduce the amount of wasted dev time.

Thanks, now I'm off to try the new RC.

[scrax]

I totally agree with r0m30, another suggestion is to add a [fixed] tag to the post in the Bugs Reports section to make it more clear just from the topic list what are the Bugs still open. Maybe a better option could be a subforum where the solved bugs report are moved after the fix are made in the trunk.

[r007]

Disclaimer: I am not a developer, but if I may, I'll chip in my 2 cents as well.

You should keep development as open as possible. All in all, Chameleon is a great bit of work and I feel it benefits a lot from its community.
It was already quite helpful for me to lurk around in here, and other people might benefit from general access as well.
If you feel annoyed by non-devs posting their opinion in here (like I am doing right now ) I'd recommend you just make the subforum read-only to the general public. If one wants to make his/her opinion heard then, he or she will have to pass some initiation rite (if only PM'ing one of the moderators), which also helps to get an overview on who is doing something.

OT @scrax: maybe bug reports should be moved to an issue management system (trac?) where they can be dealt with even more systematically. I'll see if I can find a post where I can bring this up again, if not I'll make a new one...

[rocksteady]

Nice to hear your thought guys.

This category opened up for the reasons you mentioned. Privacy for devs is sometimes necessary, but we have the IRC for that. Anyway, bare with us some more, there's a ton of ideas but we're struggling for some free time.

We'll sort out the repo front/back end first. As before for any dev that wants to run + publicly support his works/threads here, feel free to suggest a structure that would fit you. 

[Slice]

My vote is for private.
There must be a place for private talk but offline not IRC. A place where some developer may say something that he doubt and do not want to make his thought public.
For all other users there are General Discussions, Bugs, and so on.
Patches should be moved out of private room.
How many people will be appeared in the private room? Four developers (Kabyl, Valv, Meklort and probably me) and two moderators?
 

And offtopic. Who personally is responsible for the thunk? It dead since May 2010 with a few changes in November.

[Azimutz]

I basically agree with Slice on this, though i voted No. Patches should be public or made public if viable and under development, while things like e.g. "the SMC to be used" could be private?! Not sure... by making things private we risk losing important feedback from "new kids on the block", etc...

[Effendi]

Enable read access for all non-dev's but no write access, so that things are not messed up by the silly "h0w to f1x my b00t?".