Bootstrap summary: 4 Aug 2000

This is the first summary of the traffic on the bootstrap list,
covering messages until 4 Aug 2000.

The task of the list is to find a communiity structure for the
brainstorming process.  We discussed several solutions, and went with
a hierarchical mailing list solution.  Each working group (e.g.,
"language" or "internals") can have sub-groups.  Each group, whether
top or lower level, has a chair, a deadline, and a mission.  Groups
must report to their parents on a weekly basis.  There's also a
perl6-all mailing list, created in response to fears that generalists
would be left out.

The current set of mailing lists are: language, internals, stdlib, qa,
build.  Addition suggestions have been received for meta (discussion
of process and requests for new mailing lists), licensing,
documentation, unicode, and regexps mailing lists.  They're being
weighed by the project leader.  See http://dev.perl.org/lists.shtml
for a list.

We discussed the need for these groups to produce documents.  These
RFCs needed a structure.  Several suggestions were made, and a simple
format decided (it is at http://dev.perl.org/rfc/meta).  RFCs are
submitted to the librarian who automatically posts them to the web and
forwards them to the -announce and appropriate discussion mailing lists. 
We discussed holding the RFCs on SourceForge, but the urgency meant
SourceForge's learning curve would have delayed the library too long.
The librarian will still investigate SourceForge.

There are proposals to change the name of RFCs on the grounds of
confusion with Internet RFCs which are standards (our RFCs are merely
suggestions to Larry), and to add a status field to RFCs to indicate
whether discussion on them is open or closed.  Further, it is
suggested that we need some way to register not just interest in a
proposal, but also disinterest.  These discussions are ongoing.

bootstrap's heavy traffic has mostly moved to the language and
internals mailing lists.

Nat