> > Does it need to be a single person? Could it be a team responsibility like > a Toyota-style "Stop the Line" button? I think a community can decide how it > wants to mechanically run a stop process. > > The important thing – if stability is truly important – is making sure that > people with the right perspectives on aggregate stability are known, > involved, and heeded. > > David >
I think it might be worth going back to frew's suggestion of the Collective Code Construction Contract and think about whether we can try to adopt the risk management into the general governance of the project. We all seem to agree on what stability we want. We are mostly arguing over how we achieve it. I would like it to be easy enough that a developer new to the project, without needing to get deep in irc communication or mailing lists, can contribute a feature/improvement with a reasonable expectation of it being accepted. That's actually relatively rare with most open source projects, but I don't see why it needs to be. If there is clear documentation regarding what is acceptable from a stability point of view, how to contact people when you want to ask questions or for opionions, and explaining what level of tests are required it is quite possible that they will be able to produce a reasonable change without much assistance. By having the documented process it should also make it easier for the reviewers to complain about stability breaking things without needing to worry too much about how to put it, as the documentation should have the words. If we have good core guidelines then the people should mater less, and it should be easier to encourage other people to chip in time to do reviews and help with running the project, rather than it simply being seen as a fight. Having good people is definitely something we need, but we should consider that they may not be available all the time forever. Hopefully having things written down will help. Colin. _______________________________________________ List: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dbix-class IRC: irc.perl.org#dbix-class SVN: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/repos/bast/DBIx-Class/ Searchable Archive: http://www.grokbase.com/group/dbix-class@lists.scsys.co.uk