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

[Robert Douglass]

Bèr Kessels wrote:

> Did Roberts idea of the cooker get any follow-ups yet?

No, mostly because I haven't had time to pursue it. I'll summarize 
quickly here for people who weren't in Amsterdam.


The GOAL:
Assist Dries and whoever else is wearing the "core committer" badge 
process patches more efficiently by separating the ones with clear merit 
from those that are clearly not ready, clearly not desirable, or 
otherwise not worthy of Dries' 5 minutes.

The PROPOSAL:
Adjust the user privileges and workflow of the issue queue so that there 
are, in fact, two queues:
   -- the first queue is the mess we now know and love. Everything goes 
into it and it is everyone's task to evaluate the issues. The difference 
is that there is a user role that has the extra-magical-superhero power 
to promote an issue to the second queue.

   -- In Amsterdam I called this second queue the "pressure cooker" 
because patches/issues that are inside of it are known to be the ones 
that Dries will focus on. These are the ones where everybody should be 
paying extra special attention because Drupal core is about to change in 
some way. These are the ones that could hold up a release candidate 
because they are critical. The advantage of having them separate is that 
they will, by nature, receive more attention. And the attention of the 
important people.


In Amsterdam I also introduced the idea of having the issue queue be a 
real fifo queue, but lets not discuss that right now.

In summary, the most important two aspects of my proposal are:
  1) there is a user role that is more empowered to make decisions about 
patches than they are today. This group of trusted developers has the 
magical power to promote an issue to the "pressure cooker".
  2) the "pressure cooker" organizes the queue into wheat and chaff. 
When Dries reviews patches, he knows that unless someone trusted has 
promoted it into the pressure cooker, he doesn't need to fool with it 
(he still can if he wants, of course). This will negate the 
"pester-Dries-on-IRC" necessity since any issue in the pressure cooker 
will automatically get his attention. It also galvanizes the community 
around the issues in the pressure cooker since it is clear that those 
are the issues being taken seriously, the ones that are likely to "make 
it".

cheers,

Robert