I'd like to bring two announcements to your attention, that I posted to our internals Mailing list a few days ago - both refer to ongoing activities at MySQL AB to further open up our development processes and to establish an Architecture of Participation around the MySQL Server and related applications.
I am excited to be able to talk about this topic at the upcoming FrOSCon, which will take place on August, 25th-26th in Sankt Augustin, Germany. The title of my presentation will be "Opening the doors of the Cathedral - Enabling an architecture of participation around the MySQL Server". Here's the abstract:
Even though the MySQL Server is released and distributed as Open Source Software (OSS) under the GPL, the development itself so far has mostly been performed in a very closed-source fashion, as most of the developers are employed by MySQL AB. This talk covers some of the ongoing efforts to establish an architecture of participation around MySQL that attempts to move the MySQL server development process into the public, making it more accessible to other developers interested in contributing.
I submitted two additional talks about "HA Solutions for MySQL" and "Working in a virtual company: benefits, challenges and tools" - unfortunately both were rejected. However, there are two additional talks related to MySQL: "Logging and monitoring a database server" provided by Giuseppe Maxia and "PostgreSQL vs. MySQL: Venus vs. Mars" provided by Susanne Ebrecht.
I personally enjoyed last year's FrOSCon very much and I look forward to this year's edition! Make sure to mark the date in your calendar and come over to meet with us and other OSS people!
Without further ado, here's a repost of the two announcements I sent out:
Code reviews now performed in public
Those of you who are pulling from the BK source trees may have noticed it already: we have slightly updated our post-commit triggers to only send commit messages to the public commits@lists.mysql.com mailing
list (instead of sending copies to MySQL-internal mailing lists as well).
The change is expected to slowly propagate into the various team trees, so this will be a gradual transition.
The intention behind this is to perform code reviews and push approvals via this public commit mailing list instead of doing them in private, as it used to be the case so far.
By doing so we want to encourage community participation and making our development process more transparent. We also hope to get more and better contributions in the long run, as we expect the contributors to learn from our review standards applied internally. Potential errors in a patch or glitches that were not noticed by a reviewer will also more likely be caught by others
that may be following the review process. Quoting Eric S Raymond: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
In the long run, keeping the commits and reviews in one mailing list will allow us to better integrate this process with other tools like the Bugs Database.
So if you are curious to learn more about how we perform code reviews and what stuff the developers are currently working on, consider joining this list! You can subscribe to it via http://lists.mysql.com/internals
(archives are available from there, too) or by sending an empty email to commits-subscribe@lists.mysql.com.
Some more information about Code reviews and coding guidelines can be found on the MySQL Forge Wiki as well:
Join us at #mysql-dev on freenode.net!
We have now established a public IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, dedicated to discussion
around MySQL Server development (and related tools like connectors and GUI tools, of course), similar to the topic of the internals mailing list: #mysql-dev
Our developers are encouraged to hang out there as well, so please join the channel if you'd like to discuss topics related to hacking on the MySQL code base!
No support questions please - for general help on how to use MySQL, please join the #mysql or #mysql.de (German) IRC channels instead.
For more details, please see http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/IRC or feel free to contact the community team via community@mysql.com - Thanks!
