Formal MapServer Technical Committee Proposal

[Frank Warmerdam]

On 7/13/05, Sean Gillies <sgillies at frii.com> wrote:
> Frank,
> 
> I apologize for being late in responding. I'm looking for minor changes
> or clarifications on three things.
> 
> Is 2 days too short? We could practically extend this if people agreed
> to give the committee a heads up as soon as they started to scope out a
> new feature and begin a proposal. I'm against having too many gates in
> the development process, but travel and vacations can take people away
> from committee duties for more than 2 days.

Sean, 

It is true that 2 days may not give folks a chance to review and respond
in cases of travel, but I am concerned about making too long a delay for 
relatively modest proposals.   
 
> Is this committee one of individuals, like the ASF, or are we
> representing different agencies and companies? I think we could be
> explicit about this in the guidelines.

The committee is of individuals but I anticipate the individuals will
in some cases will be speaking on their company/organizations 
behalf.  I took some care to ensure the initial committee wasn't 
"stuffed" with too many DMSG folks for instance, and added Perry in 
part to act as a representative of UMN.   

I'm not sure what the purpose of being explicit about this in the
proposal would be.   There is no language in the proposal allocating
control of seats on the committee to companies.   On the other hand,
I am not prepared to ask for members to act strictly for the good of
MapServer without representing their company interests where 
appropriate. 

> It is written that a proposal must be made in the case of "substantial"
> new code. We don't have any measure of what substantial means. Could we
> change it to say that new features and enhancements require a proposal?

Well, I'm not sure we should need to vote for any new feature or enhancement.
After all, that care be seen to mean almost any change.   Recently a bug report
came up related to failure of WCS to support multi-band imagery requiring
warping.  Fixing that is essentially adding a new feature (as well as being
viewable as a bug fix) but I have no intention of writing a proposal to the
TCS or waiting 2 or more days for a response before going ahead and making
changes.   In general, I don't think we should have to go through the TCS
for enhancements that are clearly in our area of responsibility and that have
no negative effect (other than incremental increase is software complexity). 

I do think we may need to refine what we think needs to be taken to the TCS
and what does not, but I am inclined to suggest we refine that via future 
proposals to the TCS.  I am not confident we can get that right in this 
initial document. 

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent