[darcs-users] A quick message from your new issue manager

[Thorkil Naur]

Dear all Darcs users,

Here is a quick message from your new issue manager 
(http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2008-September/013887.html). 
What it means, exactly, to manage issues is not yet completely clear to me. 
But, extracting the essense, the task seems to me to be ensuring that no 
issue is allowed to be forgotten, ever. Especially the unresolved ones, of 
course, but even resolved or rejected issues may be worth some additional 
attention from time to time.

So, bug reports need to be understood, investigated, and answered; questions 
need to be answered; requests for additional information need to become 
satisfied; patches need to be evaluated and tested; new insight needs to 
become reflected in the bug tracker. All in a reasonable amount of time.

There is also the matter of prioritizing issues, which issues gets most 
attention, which issues are planned to get into which release and so on. I 
will rely on your help a lot for this: I definitely need additional 
experience in this area to become comfortable with this task.

So what will I actually do? In the near future (here meaning "days", hopefully 
not "weeks"), I will go through all the issues on the darcs bug tracker and 
see how to get organized. What I hope to come up with is, first of all, a 
mechanism to ensure that any "free-floating" report (like a new issue) gets 
some response withing a relatively short time (say, one week). And that the 
harder questions (like "need to investigate this and that complex issue") get 
responses within a somewhat wider time span (say, one month).

Additionally, a fair amount of communication needs to be in place, firmly 
embrodied on the Wiki I guess. This would be the fixed parts, mainly, since 
most of the dynamic stuff would become part of the ordinary communication 
that happens on the bug tracker.

I am not done here, I realize, more will follow as it matures.

Best regards
Thorkil