Re: patch-reviewing and the i-ching (was Re: sustainable development in LilyPond)

[Graham Percival]

On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 02:33:30PM +0200, Mike Solomon wrote:
> I am a bit lost with respect to what has to be done and who's working on
> what, but I've been chipping away as best I can on issues that, to me, seem
> under-commented-upon.

In theory, the Status:Started, Owner:foo indicates that.  In some
cases, it only indicates that foo is responsible for shepherding
it.

Exceptions: we don't always keep those updated, and anything
marked with percival.music.ca or Valentin is likely to be a
historical inaccuracy.

> I think that Graham's sustainable development presentation is excellent,
> especially the part about swag,

btw, adapted from
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-07-14-a-call-for-schwag.html

> In parallel to what he says, I feel that another way to get things
> done on a more short-term basis (i.e. before 2.14 and before Graham puts a
> sustainable plan into place) is to randomly assign issues to willing
> participants via a lottery.

I don't think we need any policy change to deal with 15 issues
(expected: 30 Criticals before 2.14).  In fact, any change is
likely to result in mythical-man-month problems.  On an individual
basis, it would be great if you chose a few Critical issues to
investigate, make comments, and maybe even produce a patch.


The balance of "investigate new Critical issues vs. review a patch
for a low-priority enhancement" is a tricky one, but I'd like to
encourage people to do more patch-reviewing and *less* work on new
(or un-investigated) issues.  Yes, this delays 2.14, but I think
that having better discussion of post-initial-patch development
effort will pay off more in the long run.

My hope is that Marek (the guy who adds ignored patches to the
tracker) job is supposed to be a failsafe -- he should have
nothing to do.  Once a patch is sent to lilypond-devel, we should
have a discussion starting within 3 days, and continue discussing
it until the patch is committeed or withdrawn.

Cheers,
- Graham