[development] Reviewing patches and making decisions -> Sociocracy could be a way to go!

[Thomas Zahreddin]

Hi Angie,

thank you for answering the first third of my mail. I think we are not on the 
same page:

in the last third I wrote explicit, that I know all the tools and places where 
to find informations - but i also mention that it is impossible to follow all 
relevant information.

To lower the workload for us all we need a summery on a much higher level than 
CVS-messages (btw how many do we count a day - my estimation is two a minute).

My request is for that higher level: For Core the policy and a handbook is 
avialable; but you can find modules in contrib that even don't have a README - 
sure you can go to the sourcecode and look what they do - but this is not 
efficient.

The documentation is only the result of a process that happens before: the 
process of making decisions - this is what i want to discuss.


Are you willing to give me a feedback what you understood? - Because I want to 
be sure we are on the same page.

Best 
Thomas

Am Donnerstag 06 November 2008 06:06:14 schrieb Angela Byron:
> > Yes I can read the code but the question above can not be answered by
> > reading the code - much more helpful would be a comment what the _aim_ of
> > some lines of code is.
> >
> > And maybe the group working on and with that particular module has a list
> > of decisions (not a mailinglist) and why they where made - so one could
> > go back to the original decision (should be referenced in the code) and
> > look up what the original intention was.
> >
> > Do you agree that these information could help a lot in similar
> > situaltions?
>
> This is actually a feature built into CVS (and most other version
> control systems) called CVS Annotate that does exactly that:
> http://www.lullabot.com/articles/cvs_annotate_or_what_the_heck_were_they_th
>inking
>
> For every line of code, you can discover who made the change, when they
> made it, and why. Assuming the maintainer is following standard commit
> message patterns, you can also reference the original issue that has all
> the background information on discussions on the code that were had, the
> development evolution of the feature over time, and why the decision was
> ultimately made to commit it.
>
> It's a pretty awesome resource because it's automatically updated with
> every commit, without the need for any manual intervention or extra
> overhead.
>
> -Angie