[Qgis-developer] Project quality discussion

[Hugo Mercier]

Hi all,

We had a discussion here in Las Palmas about the overall quality of the
project.

The main concerns / questions (I had) were:

- big organizations are starting to fund QGIS. This is great but it is
still a bit hard for a company to sell the development of a new feature,
because it is hard to guarantee it will be integrated.

- we still rely too much on volunteer work. And the situation becomes
complicated when a paid development depends on volunteer work.

These are my main conclusions.
For people who attended, don't hesitate to complete if necessary. For
the others, you are welcome to react of course.

- every new feature introduced by a core developer should be sent as a
Pull Request first. With a given "quarantine" delay after which the PR
will be merged, even if no reaction. It will allow to share information
and react in case of problems (and encourage people for good work as well :)
-> should I create a QEP for that ?

- if a company with no core developer wants to ensure a new feature is
accepted, it should pay another core developer for the reviewing part.
Ideally the money should go to the project and the project would decide
what core developer(s) to pay.
The details of this process are not very clear. It still has to be
discussed. But the goal is to make clear for everyone that if you want
guarantee: you have to pay for it and there is a clear process to handle
that.

- writing a QEP before adding a new feature is a good way to increase
its acceptance. But some people have to review it. We may come to the
same process to pay for QEP reviews.

- at which point we rely on volunteer work is not yet clear. But the
current guess is: still too much. Having a better idea of the ratio
between free work and paid work would be profitable for the project: it
would allow to make clear what the reality of an open source project
like QGIS is and that too much free work is not sustainable. Paolo's
mail is about that. The goal is to (begin to) separate clearly what is
the part of free work and the part of paid work in the project.

- see on the PSC side if it is possible to pay some people to handle
global maintenance : PR triage, reviews, small bug fixes and so on. It
does not have to be only one developer.

Thanks for participating in this discussion.