[QGIS-Developer] Reworking the QEP approach

[Nyall Dawson]

Hey all,

This has been on my mind for a while -- I'd like to kick off
discussions about how we can rework (fix?) the QEP approach to make it
more useful for everyone.

Right now we are just using GitHub issues for submission + comments on
QEPs. But this leads to an awkward ambiguity at the conclusion of QEP
discussion. Is a QEP ever really accepted? Does the end of discussion
mean it's approved? When do we formally "kill" a QEP when the
consensus is that it's not wanted?

Right now everything just ends up in the same state -- an open ticket.
Maybe someone will label it with "implemented", but we're inconsistent
in doing that.

It's REALLY hard to even just see what QEPs are locked in and which
should form part of QGIS development practices. This is preventing
them from being used for policy changes (eg
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/304 )

In short, there's just a lot of ambiguity in the process.

I think we could do better, and I'd suggest we follow GDAL's approach.
This would require:

1. Some formal policy for voting on QEPs, and corresponding criteria
for acceptance / rejection.
2. Reworking the QEP documentation so that we don't use issues for
proposals, but rather use pull requests where the final proposal text
becomes a markdown page in the repository.
(3. anything else?)

Thoughts?

Nyall