[AFS3-std] Using Gerrit for draft review

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Sun, 2010-12-19 at 14:43 -0600, David Boyes wrote:
> (Late response -- it's been a busy month)
> 
> We tried this over in the tn3270e working group, and it didn't work so

With gerrit, or some other tool?

> well. The comment chains became very unwieldy very quickly -- especially
> if the points that needed discussion were complex. We eventually dropped
> back to mail to resolve the complex issues, and pretty much determined
> that gerrit was a fine tool for code and structured stuff, but didn't
> really lend itself well to human-oriented texts.

My experience as a WG chair and participant has led me to the conclusion
that issue _tracking_ can be useful for large documents with lots of
issues, but for less complex documents with fewer issues, it's not much
better than maintaining a flat file and good communication with document
authors and the working group.  I've never found such tools particularly
valuable for _discussion_ of a document.  There have certainly been
times when it would have been nice to have an easy way to find all of
the discussion on an issue, but an issue tracker wouldn't help with that
unless someone is religious about copying in all mailing list
discussion.

> So, just a field experience with it, FWIW. Interesting experiment, but I
> don't think it'll really help. We'd need a serious collaborative writing
> tool with versioning to start doing joint composition or editing tasks.
> Framemaker has some of what we'd need, but it's bloody expensive and a
> PITA to learn how to use. Not probably worth it.

I think joint composition involving direct editing by a large group is
generally more trouble than its worth.  For a large, complex document,
having a good editor (or a couple, working together) is critical.  In
those cases, choice of editing tools of course lies with the editor(s).

In any case, I wasn't aware one could even still get Framemaker; I
thought it had disappeared many years ago.


> Let's stick to plain text. Easier for everyone.

Agreed.