Stricter criteria on accepting core enhancement tickets

[Ingo Schommer]

Hello everybody,

tldr; The core bugtracker only accepts actionable enhancement tickets with an owner,

we'll start closing old tickets not matching these criteria in order to keep our bugtracker relevant.

We've successfully migrated our bugtracker from Trac to github (discussion).

The migration only included tickets from the last two years. We've marked

a couple of older ones as migrate-todo in Trac, and still need to look over ~150 older ones.

There's a lot of good ideas in the bugtracker, and many enhancement tickets with substantial existing work (example).

But a lot of them haven't been actioned for up to six years, are not critical for the CMS or framework operation,

and we can't see them being fixed anytime soon (example, example).

It has become easy to contribute to SilverStripe through github pull requests,

as the existing ~1800 pull requests on core impressively demonstrate.

The github bugtracker is most efficient when its treated as

a moderately large action list, not an overcrowded ticket graveyard.

In this context, we'll start closing enhancement tickets that don't meeting the following criteria:

- The enhancement is clearly described and actionable

- The enhancement has an owner willing to see it through to completion

- The owner commits to completing the ticket roughly within the next three months

Anything that doesn't fit this criteria is better placed as a discussion on the mailinglist.

If the proposed idea is interesting/critical enough, it'll find somebody there to take it on

and eventually submit a pull request (example). This makes the issue just as findable

as on the bugtracker and still encourages collaboration. 

In an ideal world, every good idea would be implemented, and its up to the community contributions

to get us closer to this standard. But in practice, we have to acknowledge that some good ideas

sit around in the bugtracker without action for six years, so their value for the overall project is close to zero.

To be perfectly clear, this only applies to enhancements.

Bugs that prevent or disrupt a core operation are pretty much always valid tickets, and should be fixed.

Ingo