Re: Decision Policy [was: Intended Audience]

On Feb 1, 2009, at 10:00 PM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

>
> Ok, Maciej, thank you for saying so. If Sam think it would be right  
> to continue the debate [he asked us to not debate on the list], I  
> can certainly send about the same thing to the list - unless it has  
> moved to another subject by then. I hope that we get good rules and  
> moves from a dysfunctional group to a more functional one. That is  
> most important to me. For anything that might have disfocused that  
> goal, I'm sorry.

I will add that I agree with your core point that issues should be  
clearly recorded. I think the combination of bugzilla and the wiki  
tracker, with occasional spec notes, are OK for this, but I think  
reasonable people can disagree.

My thinking on this is colored by my experience as a software  
engineer. For software products, it is generally thought that defect  
reports are best recorded in a separate database which can be searched  
and queried. Occasionally, it is helpful to record an open issue in  
the source code, but this is done rarely. The overhead of recording  
all issues this way would be large, and it would be difficult to  
search or query the resulting records. To me, a source code comment  
corresponds to an HTML comment note in the spec. Very rarely, a defect  
is noted in the visible UI of the software. This is only ever done for  
seriously unfinished parts of unfinished software products. To me,  
this is what corresponds to a visible note in the spec.

I can understand that people might have a different perspective on  
this, and I will myself admit that a standards document is not exactly  
the same kind of thing as a computer program.

I do think this group hasn't done such a great job of tracking issues,  
but I think adding bugzilla to the mix has certainly helped.

I also think it would be useful to have this discussion about ways to  
improve issue tracking on the working group list. I'm sure lots of  
people have good thoughts on the topic. But I leave that to Sam's  
judgment.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Monday, 2 February 2009 11:22:13 UTC