DevProcess

Assumptions

• We are a cooperative community

Notes

• RFCs are one unit of decision (there may be more than this)
• An author can withdraw an RFC at any time.
• Non-contentious RFCs
  • RFC sent out
  • Timeout reached no comments
  • Author sends Len notice of timeout
  • Author starts implementation
  • RFC put on concall notification agenda
  • No comments on RFC during concall results in RFC logged as Decision
    • Comments recv'd after timeout need to be solidly substantiated (ie better have a good reason for objection)
• Contentious case
  • RFC sent
  • Comments received discussed and resolved by author and interested parties (timeout may or may not stop)
  • new RFC submitted (with shorter timeout) at original RFC timeout or later
    • the RFC may be reiterrated multiple times depending on how contentious the area is.
  • once timeout reached for RFC author sends it to Len
  • RFC put on concal notification agenda
  • No comments on RFC during concall results in RFC logged as Decision
• How do we know when consensus has been reached?
  • When the timeout expires (either first or latest RFC) or a community vote has occured (and been recorded)
• How do we know when consensus is not possible?
  • A reasonable attempt is made at consensus (intentionally subjective).
  • If a reasonable attempt fails, any participant can determine that consesus is not happening / throws up red flag.
  • Then it goes to the community (e.g., the weekly engineering teleconference). Community decision is recorded.
• Possible scenarios:
  1. RFC goes out, timeout, all is good.
  2. RFC goes out, lots of discussion, more RFCs, timeout eventually occurs, all is good.
  3. RFC goes out, lots of discussion, no agreement/consensus, goes to community for vote. One of the following two occurs:
     • Community votes, decision is made.
     • Community comes back with different idea that pushes the discussion back down to sub group for further discussion. Go back to beginning of process.

Terry thought: the last two options (i.e., mapping out the two community possibiliies in the contentintious case) may be too process-heavy. Why not stop at at "throw it up to the community", and let the community decide what to do from there?

Still to figure out

• Back-end technology / format to record Decisions
  • Throw this to the community -- two obvious choices: public SVN (not in the code tree) or the wiki. Both give history, allow editability (as resonable), etc.
• Who writes up "rejected" RFC's to be recorded?

Is this whole thing "too much"? We want the simple/normal cases to be lightweight and easy to do. But have an option for a more complex case that will guarantee resolution (given the overriding assumption). It's feeling like "too much" right now...