Utilizing Resources -- JIRA and WIKI

I had noticed that some resources I expected to find on the standard ASF distribution mirrors were missing. Without much thought I began to write an email to the developers list informing everyone of the issue. Then suddenly I realized this is exactly the sort of thing I should be entering into JIRA. An email notification will still make it to the mailing list, but now, my little request won’t get immediately lost in the daily deluge of email. It will actually be its own little to-do task, sitting there in JIRA unable to be ignored forever (unless we ignore JIRA completely). I imagine a number of the emails sent to our mailing lists, both users and developers, fall into this category of really being JIRA or bugzilla issues.

On a related note, it’s not that hard to simply cut and paste an email reply to a user question into a wiki-based FAQ. It should become habit after a little while and soon you’ll have a rather extensive resource on your hands. Of course, at some point you’ll want to tidy things up, but that’s much easier than rewriting all the FAQ’s and countless other pieces of documentation you inevitable answered four times on the mailing list.

It’s little things like this that allow us to take advantage of our resources and help a software project run smoothly. This isn’t some sort of amazing revelation, but it’s a nice reminder now and then.