[development] "I'm disappointed by the freeze"

[Ber Kessels]

On Tue, February 21, 2006 00:45, Karoly Negyesi wrote:
> The issue http://drupal.org/node/18260 is open since last March, true, but
> the first patch happened in October only and saw only 10 patches (I saved
> the issue HTML and grep'd for Attachment:).

I was actually hoping that people did not start about separate issues.
Every issue has a reason why it is not in, if you dig deep enough. This
particular issue, however, goes back WAY furhter. It started in the time
when we still mailed patches over the ML!

When we manage to not pick at specific issues and particular patches, we
come to the point that Robert Douglas presented in Amsterdam.

The chaotic, open, nonstructural, non chronological way of working, makes
it so, that even now, after a huge release slip, certain features can
still make it in. While others that are maintained by single developers
did not even make it when we were still "officially" open for features.

I mentioned too, that features only seem to make it with either
killes-patience (I was referring to the enourmous effort he made to get
the revisions revised) or with a lot of luck ("luck", since I am no longer
allowed to call it politics :)). We must recognise that not all of us have
that patience, or even that time, but that we do produce code fixes and
nice features.

Robert recognised it, and even spent his complete presentation on this.

I see this "chaos" as one of the reasons why we are still delaying and
still moving the release forward and forward. I try to get this release
out sooner, not only by reviewing patches (for which I simply have not
enough time, to do structurally) but also by pointing my fellow developers
at the fact that their persistance in a certain issue/feature will delay
the release.

And last: I know that release managers often have the guts and power, to
revert changes, or take out complete features, if these endanger the
release date. I think it is not bad to take out certain changes that are
holding back our release and save that particular feature for post 4.7. Is
this maybe a route to take?

Bèr
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