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At the close of business today we will be shutting down the
RCR majordomo mailing list. The
motivation is pretty much the same as with the old bugtrack
mailing list that was shut
down in June. Of late the RCR list
has become a bit of a dumping ground, with no one really knowing the status of
their requests. We hope that by
putting all requests into the bugzilla database we
can apply some rigor to the process.
We want to give people an honest picture of what requests to expect in
upcoming releases, and just as important, which requests not to. When submitting new feature
requests, set the Severity of the “bug”
as Enhancement. This will keep the feature requests
separated from bugs in existing releases.
You can leave the Version field
as unspecified. Obviously the version of the feature
doesn’t exist yet, so there is nothing to fill in there. All of the old rules
for submitting RCRs still apply. If a RCR turns out to be better
characterized as a bug (or visa-versa), we can always change the severity after
the fact. There are new hyperlinks on the main bugzilla
page for My RCRs
and My RCRs in Purgatory. You can use these to see the status of
your feature requests. All of the
previous RCRs from the majordomo list have been
imported into bugzilla. It will take some time to work through
these, but we hope to have them sorted over the next couple of weeks. In the mean time, don’t take the
current status of your requests as gospel. The basic modes are: NEW, unassigned: The feature request has not yet been
reviewed or assigned to anyone. LATER: The feature may be implemented some day,
but is not on our 3-6 month development horizon, and will not likely make it
into the next upcoming major release. NEW/REOPENED, assigned: The feature has been assigned to a
project lead, and will be implemented in an upcoming release. WONTFIX: In all likelihood, this request will
never be implemented. INVALID: There were not enough details given to
implement the request. The request
is functionally in the same state as WONTFIX until more information is
provided. Please don’t take the WONTFIX state personally. We would love nothing more than to
implement everyone’s requests, but tough technical and business realities
often make that impossible. If you
feel that your request has been unjustly rejected, bring it up with the
executive committee and see if you can get it resurrected. Just because something is on the WONTFIX
pile does not mean that it must stay there forever. If the right technical or business
circumstances present themselves, the request could become a reality. The reason for this state is simply to
try to be honest with people about their request, rather than putting it on the
LATER pile where LATER won’t in reality come before hell freezes. The LATER pile is basically an un-prioritized list. We may one day make use of the priority field
of bugzilla, but for now our priority (pardon the
pun) is to let people know if their request will: (1) make it into a foreseeable release,
(2) make it into some release way out in the future, or (3) never make it into
any release. We might one day start
fine-tuning the far out horizon; for now though, knowing which of those three
slots a request fits into will be a big improvement on what we have now. Ken |