[Xesam] NRL; Need your input - Leo proposes to allow from now on only "one patch per ticket" because we are slow and discussion is endless

[Sebastian Faubel]

> Form my experience, it's almost impossible to come up with a working patch 
> when suggesting something significant and especially when requesting a feature.
> 
> There are often lots of possible ways to implement something and without the 
> initial discussion, you get a 95% useless patch, especially if you aren't a 
> core developer.

I agree to the above mentioned - It should not be mandatory to send in a
patch when filing a bug report. However, a patch can often serve as a
concrete starting point for discussion on the mailing list. I mean, that
from a patch people can outline concrete modeling weaknesses and offer
concrete resolutions. One difficulty when designing ontologies is not to
get off topic and stay focused on the problem at hand. I think that this
is what really needs to be addressed.

I think it would be best to put a notification text on the bug filing
form to encourage people to provide patches for the bugs in order to get
them fixed more quickly. May be it could be helpful if the ontology
maintainers provide an initial patch when conducting the mailing list in
all cases.

> For more comments read my reply to Leo.
> 
> > My alternative:
> > - mandatory patch
> > - notification of all people designed for maintainance and those who
> > have interest about the Nepomuk effort (is it possible to populate an
> > RSS or send a mail to a list when a new ticket is added in the tracker?)
> 
> Having a mailing list with some notifications is a good idea indeed.
> 
> > - if no comments arrive within a week the patch is accepted/refused,
> > otherwise... Well, I have no alternative for this.
> 
> This works only for trivial patches which require fast resolution. We have a 
> milestone: good idea for later for a reason.
> 
> > Perhaps some constraint about timing may help in discard excessively
> > slow procedures ("the maintainer must take a decision when no one add
> > comments for at least one week, evaluating the modification and all
> > clearly expressed positions"), but I'm not sure about this.
> 
> The current policy is:
> 
> "Ontology maintainers are responsible for ensuring that decisions meet 
> consensus criteria. This means either: 
> * Waiting long enough for all parties involved to either comment or ignore the 
> issue(considered an abstention). 
> * Contacting all affected parties to obtain either their comment, confirm their 
> abstention or to set a deadline for them to express their opinion. As a 
> consequence of being responsible, commits to the repository need a maintainer 
> approval."
> 
> The only obvious  fix would be to clarify "waiting long enough". At this moment 
> this vague phrase probably means a couple of months.
> 
> The implications of the fix would probably be: milestones and priorities 
> influence what maintainers do first; maintainers can politely "demand" affected 
> parties to cooperate on the current issues.
> 
> -- Evgeny
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