[gmx-developers] Development Communication Tools, was: Python interface for Gromacs

[Teemu Murtola]

> I personally don't believe that (web-)forums help the discussions over
> archived mailing lists. But I think it is important to have a good subject
> for the mail-thread to be able to find a thread later. Ideally we would have
> a summary/conclusion of important email-threads on the wiki, but I'm
> doubtful that we find someone volunteering to write those summaries.

For general discussion, I agree that (archived) mailing lists are
probably the best choice.  If there are a lot of details to be agreed
on, an e-mail discussion can easily become cumbersome, so such things
probably would be better handled in proper meetings.  Things that come
out of such meetings and are of general interest should ideally be put
on the wiki.

For tracking what is going on in the development, the current scheme
of having the roadmap on the wiki is a good start, but it hasn't been
updated in a while...  I've had some exposure to Trac, and something
similar could work here as well.  I don't know how much of it could
already be implemented in bugzilla, but the basic idea would be to
have _all_ tasks, whether they be small bugs or large-scale coding or
performance optimization tasks, in the same system.  Trac also allows
one to add milestones and assign issues to these.  Something like this
would make it much easier to keep track of what is being done, who is
doing it, will it be included in the next release, and so on.  Having
a proper system instead of a free-form wiki would most likely keep
things much more up-to-date, much like the bugzilla now does for bugs
and small enhancements.

A teleconference now and then might not be a bad idea to discuss
general directions.

Teemu

-- 
Teemu Murtola
<teemu.murtola at cbr.su.se>