I am on OpenSearchCon and there was a discussion about the documentation of 
features. In a nutshell, the policy they seem to have is that there are some 
minimal requirements for documentation in place for each feature introduced. 
That way, there is no way (or it is greatly minimised) that there would be a 
feature released or some user-facing change introduced without any 
documentation how to use it.



Under the "documentation", in our case, I mean the docs which would end up in 
cassandra.apache.org<http://cassandra.apache.org> docs.



In their case, the documentation is either part of the change or there is a 
documentation issue (in GitHub terms) created which basically blocks the 
release when not addressed.



When there is no documentation about a feature or improvement, knob to tweak 
etc, there is virtually nobody who knows about that except the person who 
committed the code / people who participated in a review. I think this is 
detrimental to the project. I do not see the point in releasing something 
undocumented when the only people who know what is going on are the ones who 
wrote it.



If somebody argued that we have them in CHANGES.txt and NEWS.txt, neither ends 
up on the website and I do not think they are appropriate vehicles for 
user-facing documentation or for anything beyond few sentences.



Could we introduce a policy which would require developers to introduce at 
least minimal user-facing documentation (if applicable) before delivering it / 
before releasing it and it would be part of the reviews?



For now, while we also add documentation, I feel it is "the best-effort" 
approach, it is not part of the official policy when delivering it.



As of now, I can not see any information about documentation among "For Code 
Contributions" points:



https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CASSANDRA/Cassandra+Project+Governance



I am looking for adding there a new point:



Code must not be committed when user-facing functionality is not documented and 
visible without code inspection.



Regards

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