[Zope-Coders] Re: Collector Status Meanings

[Tres Seaver]

Chris Withers wrote:
> Tres Seaver wrote:
> 
>>
>> That is effectively the meaning of "deferred". 
> 
> 
> The only use I saw was "I wanna work on this sometime, so I'm doing to 
> accept it." Then it gets deferred the next day and never touched again.
> 
>  "Wontfix" means (to me,
> 
>> anyway) that the requested change, while addressing a legitimate 
>> problem, would cause more damage than good. 
> 
> 
> I think I covered this with:
> 
>     - Changes that would be sensible to make, but would impact on
>       backwards compatability in a way that's not acceptable.
> 
> Should I tweak that to:
> 
>     - Changes that would be sensible to make, but would cause more
>       damage than good.
> 
> ?

You could elaborate ( 'e.g., would break backward compatibility, would
make testing hard / impossible, etc.').

>  > "Deferred" means that
> 
>> somebody looked at it, didn't reject it as invalid, didn't judge that 
>> it was a "wontfix" issue, but that nobody was available to work on it.
> 
> 
> That's also a Wontfix for me. Because in all practical terms, it means 
> it won't get fixed, unless someone gets bored or has a point to prove 
> and drags it out... Wontfix'ing something is also usually provokative 
> enough that if someone sees something being Wontfix'ed on ZCM and the 
> ydon't like it, they step in and do something.

You can't argue from "this is how we have behaved" to "this is what it 
should mean".  "Wontfix" should be an intentionally *permanent* state; 
"deferred" means exactly what it says:  "later".  It exists deliberately 
to allow distinguishing between "never looked at" and "passes at least 
initial muster".

> Deferred wasn't a powerful enough message to tempt that to happen, but 
> just resulted in the issues beign forgotten about.

So work on fixing that, instead of hiding the dirt under a different rug.

>> I undid a couple of Friday's "wontfix" changes on this basis (one I 
>> rejected, beacuse it was really a Python issue;  the other I left 
>> pending, with a patch).
> 
> 
> Well, both of those fall into my definition of Wontfix. The patch is 
> cute, but if no-one had stepped up, it wouldn't have mattered. The other 
> one, well, Wontfix and Reject are both "end states" for me, so either 
> has the same effect ;-)

Nope, neither fits "wontfix".

Tres.
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Tres Seaver                                tseaver at zope.com
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