[Mesa-dev] [RFC] Merging feature work to Mesa master

[Brian Paul]

On 02/16/2012 01:04 AM, Dave Airlie wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11:28 PM, Ian Romanick<idr at freedesktop.org>  wrote:
>> Over the last six months a lot of feature work has happened in Mesa, and the
>> load has been carried by a lot of different people / organization. In the
>> process, we discovered a number of development process issues that made
>> things more difficult than they needed to be.
>
> While I agree with the idea, I disagree with the rationale,
>
> You state that it made extra work to figure out what had been done,
> when really it
> shouldn't if the person tasked with finishing the feature is following
> this plan.
>
> Since they would go out and read the spec, propose a test list, write the tests,
> then see where the current percentage done code was on their test set, then
> finish things off?
>
> The fact anyone would believe that a 50% in GL3.txt was in any way meaningful,
> like they are just rough guesses to say, this isn't finished, if
> someone wants to finish
> it then you'll need to look into it a bit more. It might be better to just say
> WIP + username of last person to look at it instead of putting percentages in.

Yeah, I just figured documenting that feature X is 50% done was better 
than nothing.  Adding info about who last worked on the feature and/or 
which branch the work is sitting in would certainly be good.

Back when I started the GL3 work I was the only one doing so.  I was 
picking away at it in my spare time.  The whole GL3 development 
process changed when Intel took on the project.  Obviously, when a 
larger group of people needs to coordinate on a big set of features 
like that more detailed status info is needed.

One thing I'll say is that I think it's better when the status info is 
kept close to the code rather than on a web/wiki page that people 
forget about.  The further away documentation is from code, the more 
likely it'll be out of date.  Maybe we could make a new 
docs/development-status.html file that has detailed info about the 
status of new features.  The website could directly point to the file 
on cgit.freedesktop.org so it'll always be up to date for browsing.

-Brian