Governance Ideas

[Dimi Paun]

On Thu, September 28, 2006 9:24 am, Chris Morgan wrote:
> I'm of the opinion that code is "art" as its implementation is
> subjective. The idea that you could document when a patch is
> acceptable or not seems like an impossibility.

I wholeheartedly subscribe to this. We are far away (as a profession)
to document what is a good/bad patch even when that is fairly obvious
to a good maintainer, let alone document exactly the thought process
for more complicated cases.

This is a waste of time. Alexandre is an amazing judge of patches,
we should be happy we have him. More to the point, I think this is
missing the point. If we are good at something, it is in evaluating
patches on their techincal merit. This doesn't need improvement.

What we may be erring a bit is putting the techincal aspects above
and beyond other considerations, such as desire for a feature at the
expense of a little quality. We are delaying patch inclusion waiting
for the 'right' solution, which in part is good, but when that means
keeping desired features away for years on end, i think it hurts us
more than it helps us being relevant to our users.

Maybe there's a way to help Alexandre better understand how much
people want something, maybe that can be factored in a bit?

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.