Fascinating discussion.
I just want to emphasize two things as a representative of those who knew virtually nothing about programming or open source when we started. 1) If you're serious about this doctesting (esp. on different platforms) thing, there has to be a way to make it drop-dead easy - like, "when you click submit on Trac, it starts testing on fresh builds of the latest rc on five different chips". Maybe not that quick, but something that does not require a contributor to have access to any computer but their own. For many of us, that's enough of a struggle! 2) We should stay at the level of intervention with the releases we currently have. Allowing anyone to merge after they become a guru is not good - how do you get experience to reach that level? But introducing a lot of formal layers of review would discourage people who are questioning their competence to submit that first patch, giving that first positive review - and if you look at lists of who reviews patches, and see who gives advice online, there clearly already *is* a lieutenant system of sorts for different parts of Sage. We can do it! At least some of those 12000+ users of sagenb.org have to have an itch to scratch... if we increase our number of "experts" who can do the boring details of release management by an order of magnitude or so, we should be in the right ballpark to avoid burnout. - kcrisman --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
