[wp-hackers] 1.5.2 or on to 1.6?

[Brad Fults]

Firstly, I think the bug system needs to be stabilized and organized before 
any talk of development progress is made. A custom field needs to be added 
to the new ticket system in Trac for a "Patch?" boolean. At that point, all 
bugs that are assigned and have patches should be immediately committed and 
tested for a 1.5.2 release.

After that, a huge effort needs to be put into assigning, prioritizing, and 
triaging the bug list[1]. I don't know exactly how many people have 
privileges on the bug system, but it seems to be a very small number. I 
think the team needs to allow more people to help with triaging and 
organizing in Trac. "Bug days" like those over on
irc.mozilla.org<http://irc.mozilla.org>could help this process along
greatly.

Also, I think it would be good to set up a "review" and "super-review" 
system whereby contributing developers can get their bugs approved by core 
devs and can commit their own changes to the tree. Having only two 
developers commit changes makes development slow and disorganized and I 
think WordPress needs to look ahead to the future where there is a much 
larger developer community behind it. Of course in the meantime it would 
still be simpler with only Matt and Ryan committing if they could pull up a 
list of all bugs with a patch and r+sr, allowing them to commit and move on 
to the test cycle.

After the bug system is worked out, all of these new features in the Version 
1.6 wiki entry can be added to Trac and prioritized.

With a stable 1.5.2 release behind us, we can then start to make the larger 
changes slated for 1.6. I do think that we should definitely go toward
1.6and maintain backwards-compatibility, however. Software that breaks
b-c too
often and increments major version numbers regularly ends up in a bad 
position (v13.0 sucks).

In summary, I think we need organization and a clear set of goals and 
development processes before moving ahead to the next release. (Just my four 
cents.)

[1] - http://trac.wordpress.org/report/1

-- 
Brad Fults
NeatBox
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