Hello everyone!
During the dev meeting we had many interesting discussions and agreements about
how to proceed as the ultimate TBB dev team. One of them involved collapsing as
many components as possible into a single Tor Browser Bundle component on Trac.
To this end, we have a new mailing list called tbb-bugs[1] and I've created a
Trac user called tbb-team which has tbb-bugs(a)lists.torproject.org as its email
address. The idea is to have the huge component have its owner as tbb-team, so
that we are able to see all of the bugs assigned to it via the mailing list and
then assign the bugs to individuals as needed. We will revisit this topic at
the next dev meeting in June to see if it's working out and, if not, figure out
a different solution.
We need to make a few decisions and commit to a few actions now:
1. Which components do we collapse into the huge TBB component? Here's a list
of all of the current Trac components that are candidates:
- Firefox Patch Issues
- Quality Assurance and Testing(?)
- TIMB
- Tor Launcher
- Tor bundles/installation
- TorBrowserButton
When we discussed this at the dev meeting it seemed unclear whether Tor
Launcher and TIMB would fit into such a component. I'm not sure why they
wouldn't -- please share your thoughts.
2. Pick a time and method to begin collapsing things, which will inevitably
(and IMO necessarily) involve huge amounts of triaging.
We could do this all-at-once with a batch modification to each agreed upon
component and then try to deal with the resulting mess later, or we could go
component-by-component and try to triage each one of them. It might be easier
to do this in smaller teams, 1-3 people, for specific smallish amounts (1-2h)
of dedicated time a few times a week. Or we could schedule some insane 8h block
where it's all hands on deck. Does anyone have a strong opinion about the best
way to organize this? If not, what are your preferences?
Thanks,
Erinn
[1] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tbb-bugs
At the dev meting, we agreed to hold weekly TBB meetings in #tor-dev on
IRC (irc.oftc.net) ideally either before or after the tor-core
meetings. It looks like we're going to shoot for Wednesdays at 11:00am
PST/19:00 UTC. If we can agree on this time, Nick has said that the
tor-core meetings may be able to follow ours, pending approval from the
rest of the Tor folks.
For the meetings themselves, I think we should try the following format,
inspired by Scrum, but less rigid. Everyone makes 0 or more statements
on the following three topics, with time for responses from others:
1. What have you been working on last week that other TBB people should
be aware of?
2. Will you be working on anything TBB related next week that
should/could involve other people?
3. Do you need anything else from anyone else to help you make progress
or to get something reviewed+merged? If so, what do you need?
These meetings won't be used for progress metrics/evaluation, so don't
feel the need to inflate things, explain already-solved snags in detail,
discuss your various non-TBB/life distractions, or anything like that.
The purpose here is strictly TBB coordination.
In particular, if you've been working on stuff that either isn't
TBB-related or is too premature to be worth discussing in detail yet,
you can skip items 1 and 2 entirely, or make them extremely brief (ie
"Worked on the updater").
Similarly, if you're blocked on stuff that doesn't require other
people's help/input to solve, you can skip item 3. Don't feel obligated
to tell us about issues that involving others won't really help.
However, when discussion is necessary, we can and should deviate from
the #1/#2/#3 pattern to discuss people's work/questions in some detail
without plowing straight through to the next person immediately.
After everyone has their turn to say what's they've been doing/what's
needed, we can do a little bit of freeform discussion on whatever other
issues seem pressing and who should be doing what next, discuss any
future releases/deadlines, and discuss recent support issues if any
support people are present.
We will hard-stop at 20:00 UTC for the tor-core dev meeting to start (but
hopefully will finish much earlier than that). If we end up consistently
finishing early, we can make it later so as to run more fluidly into the
tor-core meeting, for people who want to attend both.
--
Mike Perry
