On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 11:45 AM, Brian Neal <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Jan 31, 7:35 pm, Russell Keith-Magee <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>
>> The core team aren't the only people who can review tickets. In fact,
>> all you need is for someone who isn't you to review your ticket and
>> say that it looks good (by Django's standards -- which means
>> documentation, tests, PEP8 etc). Once you've reviewed a ticket and
>> you're happy, you can promote it to RFC -- which puts it much closer
>> to being committed.
>
> Russ, the advice you gave above doesn't quite jive with what is here:
> http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing/#triage-by-the-general-community
>
> "Please don’t promote tickets to “Ready for checkin” unless they are
> trivial changes – for example, spelling mistakes or broken links in
> documentation."
>
> I held off on marking something RFC because of that. Can you please
> clarify? Thanks.

Darn... i've been hoisted by my own petard... :-)

That particular section of the docs is, to use the technical term,
wrong. :-) It was written back when we had the intention of
maintaining a formal triage team. That idea has proved itself
unworkable, because it doesn't actually remove the bottleneck, it just
makes the neck of the bottle ever so slightly wider.

So, over time, the rules have drifted, until we're at the point we are
now. We've just been slack about updating the documentation of those
rules. There's even a ticket (#14401) that covers the need to do so.
Let's call this one more reminder of things I need to do.

Here's a rough version of what that section needs to say:

Trac is a community-tended garden of issues. Sometimes there are
weeds, sometimes there are flowers and vegetables that need picking.
We need your help to sort out one from the other.

Like all gardens, we can aspire to perfection, but in reality, there's
no such thing. In the most pristine garden there will still be snails
and insects. In a community garden, there will also be helpful people
who, with the best of intentions, fertilize the dandelions and poison
the roses. The job of the community is to self-manage, and try and
keep these problems to a mimimum, and educate those coming into the
community so that they can become valuable contributing members of the
community.

Similarly, while we aim for Trac to be a perfect representation of the
state of progress on Django bugs, we acknowledge that this simply wont
happen. By distributing the load of Trac maintenance to the community,
we accept that there will be inaccuracies and mistakes made. Trac is
"mostly accurate", and we give allowances for the fact that sometimes
it will be wrong.

So how should you interact with Django's Trac install?

Be bold, but err on the side of caution. If you're uncertain if a
ticket is RFC, don't mark is as such. Leave a comment instead, letting
others know your thoughts. If you're mostly certain, but not
completely certain, you might also try asking on IRC to see if someone
else can confirm your suspicions.

Start small. It's easier to get feedback on a little issue than on a big one.

Wait for feedback, and respond to feedback that you receive. Don't
just barge in and mark 50 tickets RFC in a sitting -- especially if
this is your first time. Mark one or two tickets, and wait to see if
the core committers agree. If they commit, then you know your analysis
was correct; if they bounce back to Accepted, they will provide
feedback letting you know what was missing. Address that feedback, and
try again.

Be rigorous. When we say "PEP8, and must have docs and tests", we mean
it. If a patch doesn't have docs and tests, there had better be a good
reason. Arguments like "I couldn't find any existing tests of this
feature" don't carry much weight -- while it may be true, that's an
indication that you should be the person to write the very first tests
for that feature, not that you get a pass from writing tests
altogether.

I hope that clarifies things; I'll try and update the contribution
docs to reflect this sort of sentiment.

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)

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