Diaspora project goal is missing!

Are you looking for a project manager? Or for the possible next steps to be agreed upon? Sorry, I'm not completely sure what the question is :)

First we should discuss about the current development process model. How we select new features and how we focusing on them. Imho one or more leaders should be responsible for the release planning and developer communication.

@diaspeu it could be an approach, but it's really different than the way we currently deal with the development. I'm especially surprise by the "Only accept pull requests related to the 0.5.0.0 release". Why would we want to block any contributions?

I think I get your vision here, your point is "let's focus on something specific we all agree and progress step by step". It's not a bad idea, the problem is we are all volunteer, so we just have no idea when we will have time to contribute, develop or release. So all planning is useless, it will not be respected.

Why would we want to block any contributions? Currently 27 developers working more or less on 40 different pull requests. Let's split a new feature into 27 subtasks and focusing on them.

Basically whoever has access to the main repo is the default project manager. Diaspora has sort of stalled ever since the original dev team broke up and it became a totally FOSS community project. We still don't have chat. Youtube support is still half-broken. There are no group pages yet, no event pages. Lets just focus on the stuff that has been needing to be fixed for years.

While there are good ideas in to this approach - I cannot see this kind of planning work with our current developer/contributor base. We have a large project with a large code base and project high project maintenance costs - but only a small amount of developers, and even less other project maintenance people.

Personally I see the current way quite good. Important stuff is labeled as next release and everything else is merged in as it gets ready. The large items are slowly done as fast as people who are interested in working on them get them done.

All the devs who work on this project do it for fun - I don't see how restricting what they can work on will make them write more code ;)

All in all - good ideas and all, but we need more organization to have more stricter development cycles. Of course that is not to say we shouldn't improve and evaluate - that happens all the time, like the decision to go for a 1-2 week merge freeze before a release, just as one example.

Project leader is nice, but....that man really should do what like community, else is be like slave.

@jasonrobinson states:

All the devs who work on this project do it for fun - I don’t see how restricting what they can work on will make them write more code

Which is a very valid point - I think we (as end users) are extremely lucky to have people working on this at all. I'd be against something which says "You there, developers, you must do this before that or else" :(

(which is how it may come across, intended or otherwise)

@ram518 "Youtube support is still half-broken" are you on joindiaspora? If not, we're not aware of that, please open an issue.

Don't get me wrong. The reason is focus. For example https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/pull/4410 some nice guys worked together and the new single post view come to live. Sometimes, the issues are too big to be resolved by one man show. Split big features into small subtasks and focus on them.