[Biopython-dev] To the core developers...

[Michael Maibaum]

On 7 Dec 2004, at 02:57, Jeffrey Chang wrote:

> Hi James, and everyone else,
>
> I think it is time for the project to move to a group managed system, 
> where the responsibilities are distributed out to more people, and 
> also more clearly.  While currently there are people roughly 
> responsible for different sections of the code, possible other 
> important "jobs" include making releases, checking in patches, fixing 
> bug reports, responding to help requests on the mailing lists, and 
> slightly lower priority, maintaining regression tests, documentation, 
> updating the web page.  Currently, Brad does the lion's share of all 
> this, and with (very roughly counting) nearly 600 *.py files in the 
> repository now, it's getting hard.  It's time for people to step up 
> and volunteer to take on more of these responsibilities.
>
> So what are your thoughts?  Does this make sense, and is there any 
> interest in the community for trying to spread out the work?  The idea 
> would be to give more people a stake and responsibility in the 
> project, and someone (Iddo :) to oversee and help out where he can.  
> Maintaining the project is too large a task for someone with a day 
> job, and it's too hard for one person to be responsible for the 
> majority of the work anymore.

I agree absolutely - one person (with other jobs) will not have enough 
time to be able to cope with the demands of a successful project. If 
there is anything I can do to help I'd certainly be interested 
(probably in one of the patches/bugs/mailing list parts, I don't think 
I know biopython well enough yet to write documentation or managing 
releases).

I think a short term priority has to be to clean up the mailing list. 
As a newcomer to biopython I reviewed the mailing list archives and 
very nearly abandoned ideas of using it. The first impression it gives 
is of a dead project, with so much spam that the lists are very hard to 
search for past information. I think the lists should switch over to 
subscription only, while I understand the utility of non-members being 
able to post that benefit is swamped by the spam problem in the 
archives and the negative first impression.

Michael