[Twisted-Python] Project policies Re: Twisted-commits] r17325 ...

[glyph at divmod.com]

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 11:13:01 -0700, Cory Dodt <corydodt at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:

>If you're going to have an official policy, and you're going to publicly
>chastise people on the mailing list, you'd better make sure the whole world
>knows what the rules are before you do so.  I do not consider "Re:
>[Twisted-commits] r17325 ..." to be the title of an official policy document.

I do disagree pretty strongly about this particular case being a "chastisement", but I agree with the general problem, so that's not a productive avenue of discussion. :)

The policy is documented, but in fragments, counting just now across the documents *I* happen to know about, spread across 5 different documents on 3 servers and in at least 4 different document-management systems.  The UQDS page, which is probably the best source of information, is only linked (indirectly) at the bottom of the BBD page, which isn't linked from the front page.

Clearly this is a serious issue.  Since we have a place for issues, I have created one:

    http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/1840

I've assigned the ticket for you, but I feel I should explain why - it's not because I think that, because you have mentioned a problem, you are now responsible for fixing it.  At the very least, you can't do this on your own, I recognize that to really fix the problem you will need to get participation from the people making (me) and enforcing (jp, apparently) the policies.  I've assigned it to you because you obviously care a good deal about this issue and are more likely than anyone else to agitate for it to get done right now.

I've personally known about this for a while, of course, but I am fairly interrupt-driven on Twisted stuff these days; I'm overtaxed and I can't muster the time and energy to fix an issue until it (for example) becomes an interesting thread on the mailing list that I have to deal with as I'm going through my inbox :).

I do check my trac tickets with some frequency though, and I'm always trying to resolve simple stuff.  If you can think of simple tasks that #1840 depends on please feel free to assign tickets to me.

>Usually I object to this kind of policy change; documents of policy should be
>written by a person who holds the majority opinion.  In this case, and in
>others, I was not around to discuss it when it was decided on.  (I suspect
>this was a Divmod policy that has migrated to Twisted; while this is not
>always bad, Divmod is not Twisted, and the communication avenues are not the
>same, so I don't assume the same rules apply to both.)

I'm sorry you weren't available but we did bring it up on IRC numerous times, it was mentioned in a few threads on this list before indirectly, and there was an "official" thread on the mailing list for a while dedicated to this to avoid excluding non-IRC contributors.  I think this particular exclusion may have had more to do with your having less free time available when we were talking about it.

I am, however, sensitive to the fact that it is damn hard to find maintainers for something like Twisted's windows installer (especially those that are interested in adhering to the rather high standards for quality we have been requiring), so we need to communicate requirements and such more clearly and avoid pissing you off any more than necessary. ;-)

I suspect that Twisted.Quotes will be getting more frequent updates once all of our IRC bandwidth is no longer taken up answering undocumented FAQs about unit tests, coding style and commit messages.