[stellation-res] Task/TODO Document Suggestion

[Dave Shields <shields@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stellation is a very ambitious project -- there are many 
outstanding tasks.

For example, I can think of five or so tasks off the top of my
head. Though many have been mentioned in the mail list, I think it
would be useful to put together a Task/TODO document that describes
known tasks, both to serve as a summary of ongoing work and also to
attract new developers.

If there is some interest in this, I volunteer to put together a first
draft. Though for now this would all be on a single static web page,
we should be able to offer more dynamic support, and a more congenial
environment for collaboration, once our new server is available (this
is supposed so happen sometime in early January).

Each description would include a summary of the task, work done to
date, estimate of urgency, one or more committers who have agreed 
to coordinate any work on the task, a list of known participants, 
and a Bugzilla entry number to be used to tracking relevant submissions.

For example, here's a first cut at one of immediate interest:

Topic: Windows Port -- Add Windows Support for an Open Source Database Manager 

Priority: Urgent, needed ASAP, hopefully as part of alpha release

Coordinators: Jonathan Gossage, Dave Shields (and I'm sure others)

Summary:

  Stellation currently only supports database managers for Linux. We
  need to add Windows support ASAP. Current candidates include
  Firebird (for which a Linux port is available), and MySQL. Though
  there are some licensing issues re MySQL, we expect these will be
  resolved, so there is no reason to hold off starting work on this.

By the way, this suggestion was motivated by the recent exchange with
Jeffrey Howard, as I realized the part of my recent message dealing
with postgres 7.3, was just part of a task description, and that it
might be useful to gather such descriptions together.

I'm not sure just what to call this. Common usage is "TODO"; Eclipse
uses "Task", so perhaps we should call this "Outstanding Tasks" (or is
Outstanding an oxymoron in this context?).


thanks,
dave

-- 
Dave Shields, IBM Research, shields@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.