First ideas

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

I'm spinning this off the thread we had, since I now have more concrete
ideas :)

1. Have a deadline for API docs.  Just like we don't accept API/ABI
breakage, I'd like us not to accept cases where libraries introduce new
APIs without documentation.  I saw the TwoPointThirteen calendar and
there's this:

	Jan 16 - API freeze, 2.13.5 tarballs due
	Jan 30 - 2.14.0 beta1 tarballs due, UI freeze

Could we add something in between like this:

	Jan 23 - API documentation deadline.  If you added new APIs
	to a platform library, they must have docs or we nag you endlessly.

In particular, we sometimes add non-code interfaces like public GConf
keys (which are invariably undocumented), which other people rely on
eventually and yet we make no commitment to them.

2. In each module's release notes, have a list of newly-added APIs.  You
can see that (1) and (2) are sort of tied together; if (1) happens, (2)
is nearly effortless.

3. Let's keep track of modules whose fixed/total bugs ratio didn't
increase during each release.  I'm not sure how this will work for
Special(tm) modules like GTK+ which have a million API requests, but
people don't ever follow up on them --- maybe GTK+ just needs to make a
decision and WONTFIX them after some time unless the reporters care
enough to implement the stuff themselves.

4. dotplan and ReleasePlanning are more or less the same thing.  Can we
deprecate dotplan and just redirect it to ReleasePlanning?  Any missing
sublinks from dotplan should get moved to the wiki.

5. We have talked about this in the past but have not formed concrete
plans.  Sometimes we find things that should be improved or made
consistent across the whole desktop --- a magic new API that solves a
problem for everyone, a consistent mis-use of some clipboard type, etc.
How can we get people to know about this information, and have them fix
things on time?  Is it just an organizational issue?


I'd really like to nail (1), (2), and (4) for the 2.14 release.
Thoughts?

  Federico