[mlpack] An mlpack planning meeting!

[Ryan Curtin]

Hello everyone,

Over the past months (I hoped it would be weeks but instead it took
months) I have been trying to revamp the processes through which we
manage mlpack, since up to this point it's really been pretty ad-hoc.
For instance, we seem to release whenever I'm able to, but the release
effort is huge and so... there has not been a release in a while. :)

The new website should do a lot to assist with the release process,
since that was one of the big bottlenecks.  If you're interested in
taking a look, see https://github.com/mlpack/mlpack.org/pull/6 and
please do feel free to comment.

In any case, mlpack has grown enough that one person can no longer keep
up with quite everything that is going on.  So I thought a useful way
forward here is that we can get together and meet and plot out a roadmap
to the next release.  I thought also this might be really nice to do as
a video meeting, so we can see each other and talk to each other and get
to know each other a little better. :)  (Of course, if that doesn't
work, we can always do an IRC meeting too.)

It seems reasonable to make these kind of meetings regular; perhaps
maybe once a month or twice a month.  We can keep them relatively quick
and discuss the state of current projects, what should go into or stay
out of upcoming releases, and longer-term goals and directions that each
of us have.

So, for now, I mostly wanted to take a straw poll to see what
maintainers and contributors think.  Good idea / bad idea?

If enough of us think it's a reasonable idea to do, then we can start
figuring out a time with a whenisgood or something.  We're globally
distributed, so the timezones may be a little hard (actually the only
continent we're missing for contributors is Antarctica, so if anyone
knows someone there... see if you can get them to make a grammar fix or
something).  But we can take notes during the meeting to share with
anyone who didn't make it.

Thanks, and have a great weekend!

Ryan

-- 
Ryan Curtin    | "Weeee!"
ryan at ratml.org |   - Bobby