On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 4:18 PM, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 11:42 PM, Jim Nasby <Jim.Nasby@bluetreble.com> wrote:
>> Right. Personally, I feel the TODO has pretty much outlived it's usefulness.
>> An issue tracker would make maintaining items like this a lot more
>> reasonable, but it certainly wouldn't be free.
>
> Eh, a bug tracker that tracks actual bugs would be useful, I don't
> think anyone would argue with that. A vague "issue" tracker that just
> collects ideas people have had that seemed like a good idea at some
> time in history would suffer exactly the same problem the TODO has.
I don't completely agree with that. I have often wanted to know when
a specific item was added to the TODO page, and/or its individual edit
history. With only a unified history of the entire TODO page, and
with no wiki equivalent of "git blame", figuring this out is extremely
tedious. A tracker would precisely solve this problem, if nothing
else. And when I edit the wiki and forget to make a coherent edit
summary, there is no way to fix that, while presumably an issue
tracker would be more tolerant of people's imperfections.
It could also be ameliorated without a tracker by people being more
disciplined about linking to the email archives, but evidently we are
not disciplined enough to do that reliably enough. I think we are
better about that recently than we were in the past, but without the
ability to readily see when an item was added, it is hard to go back
and find the emails to fix the past mistakes.
But, if we want a list of projects for beginners, I think it has to be
explicitly that. A list of things an experienced expert could do
trivially, but are consciously refraining from doing so that a
beginner can do them instead. It would need to be separate from a "we
can't decide if we want this or can't decide how to do it or don't
have the time to do it" list. There is no reason we have to have an
issue tracker in order to create that separation, but it could help.
Cheers,
Jeff
