[OpenLayers-Dev] Commits without review (Was: #1218: Serialization doesn't wrap nodes in documents)

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 07:16:15PM -0000, OpenLayers wrote:
> #1218: Serialization doesn't wrap nodes in documents
>  I like that this issue got a ticket.  And the review wasn't that painful
>  was it?  Did anybody learn anything?  Perhaps nobody cares to.

The problem is not that this particular review was that difficult -- it
was easy, because Paul cared about it. 

However, #1082 is a counter-example. It's:
 1. Shorter
 2. Less invasive
 3. Tested.

Yet it has sat for 2 months without review.

What would have happened if Paul were not actively working on the same
problem? This problem has existed in Safari without anyone working on it
since we first started serializing XML. Had I fixed it on my own, how
long would it have been before it got reviewed?

There are now two OpenLayers apps out there that have modified
their Layer.Google in order to add Hybrid layers as a seperate type --
a problem solved by #1082. Instead of supporting them, I have to have
them continue to maintain a custom hack in their library, something that
I feel it's important to work to prevent.

If time-to-review-completed was proportional to the difficulty of
reviewing, we wouldn't be having this conversation. The patches that I'd
like to accelerate the commit of are so minimal as to be practically
inconsequential -- and I'm perfectly willing to take the flak if they
fail unexpectedly, and to offer help to people who need help with them.
But patches like this that sit for months are not encouraging to anyone
-- neither myself, nor the people who I was helping out by writing the
patch to support. And requiring review for patches of this type simply
takes away review time from the things that actually *need* review --
like the Projection support, or Style/Rule support. The former is
outstanding for 3 months now with relatively little change. 

We have limited developer bandwidth. Instead of wasting it on things
like #1082, I'd rather have effort continue on things like #1037, which
I would love to have someone else try.

Note that the lack of reprojection support has caused:
 * Citysafe
 * Ordnance Survey
 * OpenStreetMap

to all write their own code for reprojection. Citysafe had an issue with
their reprojection code -- exactly the same issue that
http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/1037#comment:3 addresses. The Ordnance
Survey code has this bug as well (but it's less prominent due to the way
they do reprojection). OpenStreetMap depends on the support encoded into
#1036 -- and four different apps have reimplemented the equivalant of
the MousePosition and Permalink/ArgParser changes, with the inherent
bugs that reimplementing the same things over and over cause. 

So, my goal is to make it so that the little things like #1082 get out
of the way so that the big things -- like #1036 and #1037 -- can be
reviewed in a more timely manner, because they're not drowned out by
largely unimportant noise.

My suggestion in the earlier email thread was "Open a ticket for
anything you want to be in a statement about the release." "Safari
support for XML Serialization not including namespaces" is something
that I think makes perfect sense to have in the changelog about a
release, so it should get a ticket. I just don't know that I understand
what anyone gained from the process of Paul looking at the code.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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