[wp-hackers] Development Process

[Sam Angove]

On 7/29/06, Matt Mullenweg <m at mullenweg.com> wrote:
> Actually it went to the "no one is willing to work on this right now"
> bin, it's obviously a good idea we want to do someday. This isn't a bad
> thing, good ideas tend to continually resurface, it's darwinian.
>
> Anyone can and has created cool services or enhancements that get
> official blessing later, like the new themes site or plugins that we've
> included over the years. Usually the constraining factor is personal
> commitment behind the idea, not resources or infrastructure or holy water.

My suggestion was that in this case the community has not come to a
consensus. There is no lack of folk willing to work on it. There are
several competing ideas about implementation (XML-RPC, plain text,
RSS, distributed updates, central servers...), to say nothing of
possible functionality.

I don't see this as something like the themes site, because it's
virtually useless without broad support. That broad support isn't
going to happen without community consensus or an official blessing
(i.e. dictatorial fiat). The consensus isn't there, so that leaves a
decision by the project leadership. Writing code at this point would
be a waste of time.

I'm not saying that we need a spec brought down from Mount Automattic
on stone tablets --

THOU SHALT interpret the terms "SHALT" and "SHALT NOT" as described in
RFC Exodus 20 [RFCE20]...

-- but if you provide a little direction then maybe the discussion
will go somewhere useful. "Distributed updates via RSS2": okay, if
that means a new namespace then we can direct our energy into writing
a spec for it, writing tools to produce and consume it, etc. "Updates
via carrier pigeon": I can start building that on-pigeon jet engine.

If not, we'll just keep talking and talking and talking and nothing
will ever happen, *again*.