Hi Marc, On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 18:37 +0200, Marc Fargas wrote: > Hi there, > Since we got the triagers system patches and bugfixes are moving much > faster than before but there are still somethings that get stuck, > specially on the "Design Decission Needed" state.
One man's "stuck" is another man's "prioritised". > In theory, if I got it right, triagers set this state when they think > that the scope of a ticket should be brought to discussion on this list > (django-developers). It's here, on this part of the diagram where it > says "The community and/or core developers decide whether..." and the > question arises: What if a ticket is brought to django-developers for > discussion and there are no answers either positive or negative? It doesn't happen too often for serious tickets. Unfortunately it does happen sometimes and that is usually a sign that we are busy on other things. The answer is "wait some more". Try again in another couple of months if nothing has happened and try to pick a time when there isn't a lot else going on. This is the beauty of Open Source, you get to scratch your own itch and so does everybody else and if your itch doesn't coincide with the core developers' (and our "itches" implicitly include "helping others and providing points of final decision making"), so be it; that happens sometimes. Not unsurprisingly, some of us do read every single post on the list. So they don't go unnoticed. Personally, I will deliberately not comment on a particular thread because I don't want to think about it and people sometimes think that what I say matters. I really don't want to say "I don't like this yet, but am not sure why", because then I'll be pressed on the why and suddenly I have to spend some time backing up my intuition and participating in a long thread about something that isn't on my TODO list at the moment. > Is the ticket left there to die? Or can triagers assume that if nobody > has said anything in some period of time that no developer minds about > the changes introduced by this ticket? No. If it hasn't been changed it means that no decision has been made yet. > If you are thinking "What ticket is he talking about?" I'm talking about > #1051 which has been around for 1 year and brought for discussion > without success two times atleast. Speaking only for myself, the reaosn I haven't done anything about that ticket is that it is much lower priority than any of the other tickets I'm thinking about or working on. I'm not unaware of it. It isn't a trivial design decision, despite your various comments in the ticket itself. For example, another ticket was closed as a duplicate of #1051 and the recent patches on that ticket don't address that duplicate's issues at all (you seem to have dismissed them out of hand). There is broader design thinking to be done there. How much support for schemas? How much customisabilty is required/useful? What should the defaults be? How does this fit in with other database backends? We try to commit reasonably well thought-out solutions, not something that is going to be in constant flux, so some of those decisions should be made up front and that design work hasn't been done yet. I didn't respond to your first email about this over the weekend, because the reply I originally wrote wasn't particularly polite. At some point, you have to accept that this ticket can wait a bit longer. It's not like no action is happening anywhere in Django. You are in the queue of things to be processed and being in the queue is better than not being in the queue, at least. Right at the moment, the lack of support for PostgreSQL schemas is not a showstopper for the broader user base. It should even be a major inconvenience for many cases. For the group of people who might need it for policy reasons, they can apply the patch in the ticket and get on with their lives. At some point one of the core developers will get around to looking at the ticket. Staying in "design decision needed" isn't a rejected state. It means "not yet". There are many fish (bugs) in the sea here. Getting hung up on one particular ticket isn't worth the stress. > But, anyway, I think that the triaging process could be improved if the > ones involved can define about this issue: What happens if nobody > discusses a ticket when it's brought for that? > > Cheers, > Marc > > PS: Note that "Design Decision" currently holds 290 tickets, not sure > how many can be hanled by "accept/reject if nobody answers about that on > django-developers" ;) Many of them aren't really big issues, either. A lot of them are enhancement requests and propsing ways to do things that are already possible. We don't have a "one day/maybe" state (and before you say "so we should have one", note that it's been suggested before -- you aren't the only one who has threads with no resolution) and so we have to make a yes/no decision early on, or leave it in design decision as a way of saying "we haven't made a decision yet". Be aware: looking at raw counts is a not uncommon trap to get stuck in, particularly on Open Source projects, but it is a trap. Not all open tickets are the same. When you encourage the broad userbase to file tickets at will and when your userbase has a wide variety of skills an experiences, you are going to get a lot of tickets that aren't problems for everybody or are essentially enhancement requests making an assumption that everybody works in a particular way or that are possibly overlooking part of the bigger picture. These aren't bad bug reports and we should be encouraging them because they sometimes point to bigger things. But they also aren't of the same value/import as some other tickets. We try very hard to fix the high impact problems quickly and also to fix everything correctly (robustly, good design, reusable... all those motherhood and apple-pie features). Those two goals don't always align, of course, so there are some high impact problems that have been open for a while whilst we work on the "correctness" phase. But that's the guiding principle that every decent programmer works towards implicitly and if you look at the big picture, we really are achieving the same here. So whilst the open ticket counts always *could* be lower, it's not a worry to me that they aren't. Note also, that they aren't increasing at a great rate lately, despite a much larger number of trivial things and that is where the triagers identifying that the trivial ones are complete is helping a lot. With best wishes, Malcolm --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
