OTP development, was Re: Gaga about bifs

[Wiger Ulf]

From: "Ingela Anderton" <ingela@REDACTED>

> > I think much of this boils down to the issue of providing
> > feedback about what is actually going on, which ideas are
> > rejected because they're not good enough (and why!), which
> > ideas are basically accepted, but not implemented due to
> > time and resource constraints (and then how others may help)
> 
> Alas this also takes a lot of time. I do not think that we have
> found a good solution to handle this yet. It seems to be evident that
> the open source community would like to have more feedback. It is also
> quite evident too me, that all suggested solutions so far adds too much
> overhead for us, at least for our current situation.

I have no good solution, alas. I realise that part of the "problem"
is that you have to maintain a secure way of handling confidential 
information about your paying customers. This is impossible at e.g.
SourceForge, which is otherwise a very nice environment for an
Open Source project. Also, the fact that we, your paying customers,
have rather extreme requirements on stability and backward 
compatibility, means that you have to have very tight control of what
changes go into a certain release.

I think you need to have a ticket tracker that's capable of separating
open and confidential stuff, and simply generate listings of tickets,
open and closed. Ideally, paying customers could view their own 
tickets as well as the public ones. Are you using the Bluetail Ticket
Tracker or some other Open Source tool? If so, it would be possible 
for others to assist in developing this functionality.

I'm not aware of that many mission-critical middleware products that 
are available as Open Source (at least not products that are more open
and "interactive" than OTP), so there are few references on how to
do this properly. 

/Uffe