RE: The Harvesting process and the BFAV

First of all, I agree with almost everything said up to this point. :-)

1. Avi points out one of the most important things that we have been
talking about for ages. We need to "stake out" the packages. It is all
about trust, sense of ownership and responsibility and motivation. Very
important. Very. :-) We called it Stewards but we never got around to
"appoint" them so it kinda stalled. Fortunately the (few) packages
actually broken out where appointed maintainers simply because you
*need* to enter that when they are registered. :)

In short - we need to start staking out the image with Stewards. Adam
Spitz IIRC posted a great list of packages currently isolated in the
image and a few people stepped forward. Let us simply delegate this task
to one of the Guides to coordinate. Anyone up to it? Ned? Tim? That task
is for starters to simply take that list and put names on the packages.
The next step is how to do the stakeout in practice (Avi probably has
ideas with PI etc).

2. We probably need to "loosen up" the harvesting process. What I mean
is that, as Andreas points out, I think we need to trust each other a
bit more. At least we need to trust "the experts" a bit more. Most other
open source projects simply trust the developers to commit - and then
fix things when they break. For example, when Ned makes fixes to Morphic
I trust him. There are various constraints we can have - like for
example letting people "commit" when in alpha only etc.

The only single problem I have with "trusting the experts" is that I
actually *don't* trust anyone when it comes to *comments*. I am sorry to
say, but most of you (sure, I make mistakes too sometimes) simply suck
at commenting your code - even the best of you. ;-) ;-) <- Two smileys
here - but I am actually dead serious. On the other hand - such a check
can be automated, at least making sure that new classes have a class
comment longer than one sentence, and perhaps methods consisting of more
than 3 lines of code should also IMHO have a "top" comment.

Also, bullet #1 above would IMHO also mean that the Stewards should be
free to "commit" on their own.

Well, my 2 cents.

I think BFAV and the harvesting has worked pretty good - don't get me
wrong. And all work with it has been done by others than me. But I think
the current process has problems and that we can do even better.

regards, Göran