[SciPy-dev] Scipy workflow (and not tools).

[Travis E. Oliphant]

Charles R Harris wrote:
> I don't think there are enough eyes at this point for a strict review 
> policy. How many of the current packages have any maintainer? Who was 
> maintaining the stats package before Josef got involved? How many 
> folks besides Robert could look over the changes usefully? How many 
> folks looked over Travis' recent addition to optimize?  Who is working 
> on the interpolation package?
>
> I think at this point we would be better off trying to recruit at 
> least one person to "own" each package. For new packages that is 
> usually the person who committed it but we also need ownership of 
> older packages. Someone with a personal stake in a package is likely 
> to do more for quality assurance at this point than any amount of 
> required review.
Yes,  my feelings exactly.   Quality goes up when people who have a 
personal stake or attachment to the code are engaged.   How do we get 
more of this to happen?   Formal review processes can actually have at 
least some negative impact in getting people engaged.     Let's make a 
tweak here and a tweak there.   Right now, I'm of the opinion that 
whatever makes the *workflow* of people like David, Pauli, Jarrod, 
Robert K, Robert C, Nathan, Matthew, Charles, Anne, Andrew, Gael, and 
Stefan (and others big contributors I may have missed) easier, I'm 
totally in favor of.    If that is a DVCS and/or something different 
than Trac, then let's do that. 

It sounds like we are making steps in that direction which is excellent.
 
>
> I don't have a problem with folks complaining about missing tests, 
> etc., but I worry that if we put too many review steps into the 
> submission path there won't be enough people to make it work.
This is exactly the way I feel....  I don't want to imply at all that we 
shouldn't be bugging each other about documentation and testing.  I 
personally welcome any reminders in that direction.  I am just worried 
about whether or not we are really solving the real problems that make 
it hard to contribute by instituting policy rather than providing 
examples of code to model.

I do see a real need to fix the SVN-Trac workflow bottleneck as well as 
anything that helps the release process.    It's actually at the release 
process where I would institute any formal review process.   I'm also in 
favor of having a regular (i.e. every 3-6 months) release process.   The 
difficulty there again is man-power.  

-Travis