On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Jonathan Phillips wrote:

I don't think reducing this list to the teens will be a problem, as many of the bugs will be cut out with our new implementations and improvements in UI.

Most of the bugs seem to be in usability.

Cool, I sure hope that's so.

Also, many bugs in the sodi tracker were actually requests for features, so please everyone look at the new features.

For bugs that are actually feature requests, let's make sure those get recategorized. No need to have them count against us while we're getting the bugs ground out.

I think my next task will be to move feature requests from sodi over to inkscape. Do you all trust me to do that initially? I know we need much discussion over these requested features. I will move them over first, then after that, we should all spend time looking at feature requests and post ideas/solutions to the wiki.

I agree; patches were the first priority, and those are done. Bugs second, and thanks to you those are also done. So feature requests are the one remaining item.

Note that I had gone through the Sodipodi feature list long ago and organized them into programming tasks:

http://www.sodipodi.com/index.php3?section=development/tasks

I did this because many of the feature request tickets were repetitive, or insufficiently specific, or contained multiple requests in a given ticket. I think these programming tasks are clearer and more specific about what to do to get the feature implemented.

However, I found that being a couple levels down on the website they tended to not get much notice, so this may have been a bad place to put them. I am wondering if having them in the feature request tracker (so all RFE's can be found in one place), or in wiki (so they can be discussed and revised), would be superior. Maybe some combination of both. I'll leave that decision to you.

Also, speaking of Wiki, there is also a scratchpad where I've been tossing random feature requests that come in:

http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FeatureNotePad

This is considered just a temporary staging area though, and all of the requests should be migrated into the proper feature request tracker.

If we chose to leverage Wiki moreso than the RFE tracker, an approach I had considered would be to first start by migrating the Programming Tasks from the Sodipodi website into Inkscape Wiki - you can get the files via Sodipodi SF CVS or from the website tarball in the Sodipodi Downloads page. Then go through the Inkscape FeatureNotePad and move any repeated feature requests over as appropriate. Finally go through the Sodipodi RFE tracker and copy over those. I would then use the RFE tracker just as a mechanism for users to submit new feature requests; perhaps we'd close them once they were incorporated into Wiki.

If we chose to use the RFE tracker over Wiki, then the process would be similar to the above except the written up feature requests would reside in the RFE tracker instead of Wiki.

I think I tend to prefer having the feature requests end up in Wiki, since that allows them to be elaborated on, discussed, revised, etc. which is valuable to do in order to make them implementable, and that's exactly the sort of thing Wiki's are good for. The RFE tracker works good as an "inbox" since it gives a consistent way for users to submit to, along with bugs and patches.

Anyway, what do others think?

Bryce