[Pandas-dev] Managing the pandas firehose

[Wes McKinney]

Hi all,

Welcome to the new pandas developer list! I thought it would be good
to have a place for higher level discussions about the project and
other initiatives, so I made this.

One note that I wanted to pass on as we move toward the 0.11 release
and going forward-- if I could get your help classifying and
categorizing incoming issues, that would be a big help of staying on
top of things. What does this mean?

- Incoming issues: mark milestone as next release (bugs and other
"must fixes" or low hanging fruit), next next release at your
discretion. "Someday" otherwise. On GitHub you can see there are
30-something issues that have no milestone-- in January there were
over 100 and I had a "milestone classification" binge. Would be great
to not be the only one =P
- Pull requests: also mark with a milestone please! This helps keep
track of what release pull requests were a part of later on.
- Label accordingly-- you all have been doing a good job with this.

Code review and pull requests:
- For one or two commits that aren't likely to be controversial (e.g.
Jeff has been doing a lot of little doc additions), I don't mind if
you push directly to master. If you think having someone else (doesn't
need to be me necessarily) sign off would be good, then leave until
that happens.
- I don't mind if you use the green button-- I waffle between regular
merges and cherry-picks when the number of commits is small.

My main concern with ongoing development is making sure that things
don't fall through the cracks and that bugs that come into the issue
tracker get promptly classified. Any other thoughts?

At some point we'll have to think about release management-- I have
been carrying that torch since pandas 0.1, but at some point maybe
someone else will do it. Part of it relies on having access to a
fully-equipped Windows VM with 32 and 64 bit versions across all
Python versions-- I have a virtualbox image that should get hosted
someplace that is not a physical box in my apartment at some point.

- Wes