We are all adults here. Well mostly, excluding some child-prodigy- developers we have.
Policy is for people who have no judgment. I just read a ticket where Robert Miller said, "Take it to sage-devel." Burcin took another ticket I was in on to sage-devel. A third ticket got sent back to "needs info" by Mike Hansen after having a positive review for 10 days. Don't know about the resolution of the first ticket (yet), but I know the latter two were improved by the expanded discussion. So we can, and do, back up and reconsider or take things to a larger group. And if an spkg mucks up a release in testing it can be pulled. Isn't that why we test (as opposed to setting a positive-review standard that requires passage on a wide variety of systems)? What about the packages that only release "stable" every couple years, but we know are high quality in between? Or the "stable" releases of others that really aren't that good no matter what? Can we exercise some judgment? And move back and forth from sage-devel and Trac as appropriate, needed, requested, desired? I have enough "policy" in my life. I want Sage to be high-quality. But I want that to come from the reasoned judgment of smart and dedicated people I trust and respect. Yes, we do need some policy - like doctesting, code formats, etc. Yes, the issue of spkg quality should definitely be addressed in the Developers Guide and sage-devel announcements should be prominently mentioned as one avenue (and maybe the possibility of votes if it seems necessary). Lets replace policy with culture. I'd rather we monitored sage-devel and Trac and participated politely and respectfully rather than promulgate policy. Help each other out and teach one another when we see someone stray (often necessarily) into areas (build systems, languages, interfaces, web design, mathematics) where their skills are weak and ours are strong. I'm no expert, but I've derived a lot of satisfaction from helping several newbies get started developing for Sage - some of whom have since made significant contributions. And I'd really rather see fewer Sage developers refer to an "ever increasingly bureaucratic model used for Sage." Rob -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
