2021.04.13 Hangout

Community Weekly meetings
1

Tomorrow, we will be having our next weekly hangout at 10:00 AM ET until 11 AM ET.

Anyone is welcome to join to ask questions at https://bit.ly/slicer-googlemeet-hosted-by-kitware

Agenda:

Feel free to post to this thread to request/suggest a topic!

Thanks
Sam and J-Christophe

2

We should have a place to communicate the Slicer roadmap (what modules, features we plan to add/deprecate/remove). Need to find a good place for that.

  • Wiki: Traditionally, we would put this on the wiki, but we are moving away from the wiki (not interactive enough, new users cannot register, it uses wiki markup instead of markdown, etc.).
  • ReadTheDocs: It does not really belong to the Slicer source code repository. It is planning/management document, which does not need Slicer version-specific archival (and we don’t want to see very much outdated roadmaps in old Slicer documentation). We should link to the roadmap document from readthedocs, though.
  • Discourse: We could add a new category or add just a new topic within Development. “Wiki” style post can be created that all users with wiki editing rights can modify.
  • Google docs or Office online: This would work well while collaborating actively on a working document, but it is not well suited for long-term maintenance and discussion with a broad community.

None of the options are perfect but probably a wiki-style discourse topic would work the best, because users could easily subscribe to see changes and participate in the discussions around it.

3

Agreed, some clarity and buy-in on the plans would be helpful for everyone.

Another option could be to use github issues for the details and then a readme.md to track the high level. Could also use a github project to organize issues.

4

I would suggest a separate repo (so not source code) on github, because Markdown is so much easier for writing documents (if you are not anticipating a lot of figure or graphics etc).

Google docs is an option. If persistence and some sort of tracking is important perhaps you can consider OSF.io, which offers google docs, and github integration. There are some examples here: OSF | Curated List of OSF Example Projects Wiki
Probably the most relevant is the working group/committee example…

5

I would advocate for embracing GitHub for more project management functionality.

  • GitHub issues for details of individual “Add New Thing” / “Deprecate Thing”.
  • GitHub milestones to detail which things are in the near term or long term. With the new goal of quarterly stable releases, I think it would make sense to have “2021 Q1”/“2021 Q2”/“2021 Q3”/“2021 Q4” milestones that would more clearly detail what things are actively being worked on, versus will be worked on in a few months, in many many months, etc.
  • GitHub Wiki functionality for details regarding roadmaps. When you go to create a wiki for a repo it states:

Wikis provide a place in your repository to lay out the roadmap of your project, show the current status, and document software better, together.

You can see how a mature project like Visual Studio Code use the GitHub wiki to detail their roadmap. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/Roadmap. The wiki is Markdown based. It can be updated by many people by modifying files which are contained in a separate repo. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-wiki.

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6

Yes, I like the way VS Code does it.

7

@jamesobutler Using the github wiki is a great idea. We could gradually move over there all Slicer version independent content from the old wiki.

I like the vscode roadmap, too. That project is a few magnitudes larger than Slicer, but there are some useful concepts to adopt.

As a test, I’ve enabled the wiki and added some content - see here:

1 Like
8

Discussed:

  • Improve Discourse category/tag to better track which post is related to extension build issue
  • Roadmap organization

Action items: