Re: [birt-dev] Help with BIRT Reporting

[hvbdev <hvbdev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nikolai's question brings to light one of the problems the BIRT project 
had in the past: Engagement with the community.

As a BIRT user, you didn't know where to go to with questions, bug 
reports etc.

The bugzilla bug list used to be so huge and bug reports seemed to be 
ignored anyway.

And where is a place for helping each other? There are some forums, I 
remember I stumbled over one a few weeks ago, but I cannot find one now.

The page https://www.eclipse.org/birt/community/ still shows the old 
bunch of links (some of them seem to be out-dated).

We should avoid to make the same mistake again.

My personal opinion is:

- There should be a place for BIRT users to ask questions and help each 
other, mainly about developing reports WITH BIRT and about integrating 
BIRT. The place where I regularly do this is on stackoverflow.com, I 
really like that system - but I'm open to other ideas if they offer 
similar functionality.

- There should be exactly one place for reporting bugs (but 
bugs.eclipse.org seems abandoned - I think the issue tracker on GitHub 
is the right place)

- The GitHub repository with pull requests is also the right place for 
enhancements and bug fixes.

- The birt-dev mailing list should be reserved for talking about the 
development OF BIRT, not WITH BIRT.

- There should be a place to exchange snippets/ideas (I think of a wiki 
on the new web site)

- Smaller projects xxx also have a xxx-users mailing list, but I don't 
think this is good for BIRT.

We should decide about this shortly after the 4.9 release and then 
document it on the new web site.

Henning