[Zope3-dev] Zope X3.1 release

[Martijn Faassen]

Stephan Richter wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 March 2005 04:53, Martijn Faassen wrote:
> 
>>>Currently we have about 40 urgent issues and
>>>80 XXX comments.
>>
>>Is it an idea to turn XXX comments into issues? This way it becomes a
>>lot easier to defer certain issues until after 3.1. XXX comments are not
>>easily deferable.
> 
> 
> That's exactely the point. XXX comments should not be deferrable. If they are, 
> then they need to be TODO comments. So often (as in 70-80% of the time) it 
> turns out that a XXX is a TODO. Somebody just has to go through them.

Deferring an issue or not is the responsibility of the release manager, 
and the release manager should ideally have access to everything that 
needs to be done within some issue tracker overview. It should not be 
the responsibility of the developer writing the original code to declare 
an issue non-deferrable. The developer shouldn't even have that power in 
the first place.

It is surprising to me that, with a project with as much quality 
assurance during development as Zope 3, there are 80 non-deferrable 
have-to-fix issues before a release can be done.

But, it actually turns out that it is only 20-30% of those, so only 
about 20 cases. The rest can safely be deferred anyway. This shows that 
  the policy of XXX being non-deferrable is simply not working.

With the current policy in place, the release manager has to go through 
the issues in the issue tracker *and* through the XXX points, there 
being no single overview of the release status. Without issue tracker, 
it's hard for other people to get an idea, it's hard to assign issues, 
it's hard to communicate about issues. In addition, the release manager 
will have to do two different things to actually defer an issue, one of 
which has an obscure record (SVN archives).

A better policy would be for the release manager to completely ignore 
all XXX comments, and thus force people to create issues for matters 
that they consider really important, as they should've done in the first 
place.

Regards,

Martijn