Traditionally, Beaker's design processes have been fairly closed. If you
weren't part of the Beaker team, participating directly in conversations
on IRC or following the right bugs in Bugzilla or code reviews on
Gerrit, major changes in Beaker's capabilities could come as a complete
surprise. When release announcements were made (and they generally
weren't announced on this list), they consisted of a series of bug
numbers and titles, without a clear explanation of what the new release
might mean for *users* of an upgraded Beaker installation.
We don't think this is a healthy situation for the project to be in, and
so we're taking a number of steps to help change that in the run up to
Beaker 1.0 (currently expected in mid-to-late March).
1. We have now published a technical roadmap at
http://beaker-project.org/tech-roadmap.html
We aim for this to provide a high level view of what the Beaker team see
as Beaker's major current shortcomings, as well as some insight into
what we're actively working on. We value external contributions to any
part of the system, especially those that align with this road map.
2. Proposals for major new features and architectural changes in Beaker
will now be published at
http://beaker-project.org/dev/
I've been a CPython core developer for several years, and one of the
things I think we get fairly right is the Python Enhancement Proposal
process for discussing and reviewing significant changes to the language
and standard library. By introducing a similar process for Beaker, we
hope to stimulate early feedback from our users and other developers,
resulting in more appropriate final designs.
If you have an idea for a design proposal (especially if it's related to
a topic already on the technical road map) please send it to this list
(beaker-devel(a)lists.fedorahosted.org) for review and discussion.
3. Future Beaker releases will be accompanied by user and admin oriented
release notes (not just a list of references to developer oriented
Bugzilla entries)
Again influenced by CPython's development processes (in this case, the
"What's New in Python X.Y?" guide that accompanies each major release),
we hope that these enhanced release notes will help Beaker users become
aware of the interesting new capabilities provided in each release, as
well as which significant bug fixes allow things that were previously
impossible.
Another change that was made some time ago, but perhaps not widely
advertised, is the provision of a public "Developer Guide" at
http://beaker-project.org/dev-guide.html, as well as
the web service API documentation at
http://beaker-project.org/server-api/
Note, all of the links above are accessible from the "For Developers"
section on the main Beaker help page at
http://beaker-project.org/help.html
Regards,
Nick.
--
Nick Coghlan
Red Hat Infrastructure Engineering & Development, Brisbane
Python Applications Team Lead
Beaker Development Lead (
http://beaker-project.org/)
PulpDist Development Lead (
http://pulpdist.readthedocs.org)