[QGIS-Developer] Explicit policy re bug fixing responsibilities after new features

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Nyall,

On Tue, 10. Mar 2020 at 08:13:58 +1000, Nyall Dawson wrote:
> "Following any new feature development, it is the original developer's
> (or organisations) SOLE responsibility to implement bug fixes relating
> to the new feature (or regressions to other parts of QGIS which have
> resulted from its development). This extends up to the next major QGIS
> release following the feature being merged*. It is NOT acceptable to
> use QGIS.org sponsored bug fixing efforts to implement these fixes.
> Failure to provide fixes to all reasonable bug reports raised for a
> new feature may lead to that feature being reverted prior to release."
> 
> *i.e. currently 3.14
> 
> Personally, I think having this as part of our developer agreement
> would help clear up some ambiguity and source of frustration/conflict
> between developers.

To me it's obvious that you have to take responsiblity for what you did - as
long as you only have to clean up your own mess.  Do we need an explicit rule
for this?

Once others touch the feature or features need updates because of other not
directly related changes, that ends - and moves on to whoever created the new
mess.  Otherwise a feature should have a maintainer and should be off limits
for others - which I'd say we don't want either.

So I'd expect the rule to often end in an grey area where you cannot just point
at whoever initially did it, unless it's broken from the start - in which case
it should not have been merged in the first place.

And IMHO the decision on whether to remove or fix features should not be tied
to whoever contributed it and whether that someone still maintains it, but on
the value of the features in form of it's (apparent) width of adoption.  If
it's used, we won't nuke it even if the initial contributor went away - and
it's in our interest to maintain it.

Stuff that continuously produces headaches without being significantly used
should go - give or take a maintainer.


Jürgen


PS: I like it better to discuss particular cases than to discuss generic rules
    that are supposed to fix issues, that are not actually mentioned.

-- 
Jürgen E. Fischer           norBIT GmbH             Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
Dipl.-Inf. (FH)             Rheinstraße 13          Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
Software Engineer           D-26506 Norden            https://www.norbit.de
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