[mapserver-dev] Review of some old Mapserver issues

[Rahkonen Jukka (Tike)]

Hi,

I spent two and a half hours for reading the 20 oldest Mapserver issues from Github. I did not select the issues and I wrote a short comment about each. If I knew something about the case I did some fast lookups to Mapserver documentation and OGC standards.  A commented list is available in http://latuviitta.org/documents/review_of_old_mapserver_issues.ods

With my knowledge on Mapserver I could classify these 20 oldest issues, all from year 2004, into these classes:
invalid: 1
for sure fixed: 2
can be closed for other reasons: 4
for sure a reason to keep open: 2
needs an opinion from someone who knows: 11

I could classify 8 issues per hour, a sustainable rate might be about 5. For being amusing 4 or 6 hours per day would be the maximum. In addition to my work it would take perhaps 30 minutes developer time to decide what to do for those 11 cases which are too specific even for a power user.

I hope these numbers are useful if someone plans to organize a ticket closing sprint or party. Ten power user qualified participants could classify roughly 200 issues per day. In addition, there should be 4 developers whose expertise together covers mostly everything in Mapserver and who could spend 3 hours very soon after the sprint for deciding what to do for the uncertain class. As an infrastructure there should be a recent Mapserver with good WMS, WFS and WCS layers online so that the requests could be tested and requests and responses could be added to the sprint end document.

I used also a couple of hours with GDAL tickets. They felt harder for me because of large number of drivers which are unknown to me and servers which I have never used. It looks like GDAL developers were still able to close a few tickets based on my comments. Same result with Geoserver.

-Jukka Rahkonen-