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@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.