[Bacula-users] Bacula project design process

Hello,

Recently several email design threads have pointed out an important deficiency 
in the Bacula project that I would like to discuss. We (I) I have already 
designed (mostly in my head) a good number of future projects -- including 
how to support portable clients better, deleting volume on purge, clients 
initiating backups, ...  Often these are put down in sketchy notes and shared 
with the programmer who wants to do the work (mostly Eric).  Generally the 
solutions designed are far more general and complete and already encompass 
much of what is being discussed via email.  The problem is that this process 
is not well defined and is not implemented in a way that a number of users 
can participate or even see what those proposed designs are.

It seems to me that we need a more public way to share Bacula design proposal.  
Launchpad has a nice way of doing that (I forgot exactly what they call it), 
but I have recently moved off of Launchpad because as a project manager, I 
was unable to properly structure the project (it seems that only the 
Launchpad programmers can do that), in addition, I found launchpad very 
difficult to navigate.

What we need is either a place where I can publish approved designs (probably 
the web site) or possibly a special design wiki.  At the moment, it is not 
clear to me that a wiki would work well -- the biggest problem is that many 
users don't fully appreciate the Bacula philosophy and how Bacula works, 
which means that it is easy to go off on a tangent.  This is not a criticism 
of anyone, but is meant to point out that designing new features for Bacula 
is very non-trivial and requires a *lot* of work and thought before any 
implementation begins.

I suppose that the first step is for me to write up (or gather up what is 
already written) a few of the designs for ideas that are being discussed on 
the email lists so that you can see the direction I currently favor ...

Does anyone have any comments or ideas on this?

Best regards,

Kern

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