
Django core: Improving our decision-making and committer process - conesus
http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/9ebc3e57d539d1ff
======
gabrielroth
I don't know enough about the specifics of the case to assess the new policy
on the merits, but I will say that as a piece of writing this is a model of
how to change policy gracefully: clear, forthright, and non-defensive.

~~~
forsaken
It's useful to have journalism and english lit majors as the BFDL's for a web
framework. This is the main reason that the documentation for the framework is
so amazing, the owners of the project really care about it.

~~~
Pewpewarrows
It's probably safe to say that Django has hands-down the best documentation
I've ever had the pleasure of using in an open-source project. No matter what
you need, be it a step-by-step tutorial for first-timers, detailed
documentation of every piece of the framework, low-level API docs for
basically every function in the damn framework, or guides to writing your own
reusable "apps" in Django, it's all right there on the project's website.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss (one of the creators of Django) wrote a great series about
documentation specifically at <http://jacobian.org/writing/great-
documentation/>.

------
Pewpewarrows
This is a great step for them to be taking as they're getting ready for 1.3
development (for the uninformed, 1.3 is mostly going to be for closing the
massive amount of tickets/bugs that Django has accumulated, and generally
cleaning up the code base with even more documentation). One of the biggest
concerns brought up by multiple people at this year's DjangoCon was the
process of getting something into Django's trunk as an outsider.

Great to see them addressing the issue head-on so soon!

------
barnaby
Sounds like they're addressing some of the growing pains in Django's ever
increasing popularity. Good problems to have I suppose.

------
jnoller
This is awesome Jacob, and good work from Django Core - there's a few things
for python-core to consider here as well.

------
kilian
Great news, here's hoping one of the new patches will finally be a truncate
template tag ;)

~~~
themanr
You mean like
[http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/...](http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/?from=olddocs#truncatewords)
or something different?

~~~
forsaken
I think he means this:
[http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/...](http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/?from=olddocs#slice)

~~~
nicpottier
No, neither of these is what people have asked for over and over..

This is actually one of the banal examples of Django's broken process. For an
interesting read on it all, check out this thread. No fundamental downsides
given, yet it languishes forever more.

[http://groups.google.com/group/django-
developers/browse_thre...](http://groups.google.com/group/django-
developers/browse_thread/thread/924112bf84709225/374a5406d92bfa6f?q=truncate&lnk=ol&);

~~~
ubernostrum
Seeing as I know that thread pretty well, I'm not sure I agree with your
characterization; for example, the first couple replies from committers raise
a valid point about whether it's a necessary feature given what Django already
offers. Later replies go into specific questions about use cases, technical
issues, etc., and honestly that's the way it _should_ be.

Meanwhile, for all the people who are apparently up in arms about this
feature, only one's ever bothered to put a patch on the ticket, and the patch
is three years old and has technical problems that I brought up in the email
thread. That's not the way to get a feature into Django, as far as I'm
concerned.

~~~
hartror
Given the ease of implementation of many of the feature requests I see on the
django lists and the (seemingly) critical nature or large inconvenience
described by the requestees there is an annoying lack of patches.

This is a problem that most OSS projects suffer from and I think the change in
tack goes some way to addressing this problem. Certainly I am going to go and
finish off my patches and start trying to get them accepted. I feel more
confident that putting the work in is going to be worth my time as the
processes are being improved to get them committed and I won't have to go on
maintaining a fork forever and ever.

