Part of the problem with all of this is that what worked at small scale, now needs to be automated.
That’s what we do - we build tools to automate the yucky, error-prone stuff away. Take source control - managing revisions and changes on the bit and byte level are controlled and tracked and can be undone, reapplied to a different version, etc. Instead, you control the larger metaphor - branches, files, revisions.
I think a large-scale open-source development process, with a lot of community discussion and noisy RFCs, lots of features and work being tested, we need to treat that as source code.
Take for example the Unstable book. I look at the first thirty or so items and found four that were no longer unstable, or had been obsoleted by new features that are stable.
This is a symptom of a deeper problem - the initial draft of the Unstable book was back when the change velocity of the language was much lower, so it was easier to keep up to date.
A custom built tool or customized software service that gives us customized workflows, the ability to link issues and categorize issues, search them in robust ways, and so on is what we need.
We need issue tracking software, maybe with a custom plugin for handling the comment volumes in more robust, and still taggable/searchable/categorized ways.
Ie, if someone adds a comment of “I support this RFC”, the comment can be minimized and some sort of counter is incremented and the increment is linked back to the comment - reducing the noise of the comments without removing them. It also adds meaning to that comment, which can then be categorized and searched.
This isn’t an area where we want to be writing lots of new stuff. At my day job, we use Atlassian’s JIRA which can integrate with git repositories. We track issues, feature work, customer reported defects and work, all on it. It has a customized workflow, which varies based on the issue type, which forces us to follow a specific process with issues. For example, the RFC process could be automated this way with the custom workflow tool. Instead of needing to manually follow steps from a checklist, you can only move an RFC in specific directions and ways.
(This isn’t a suggestion to use JIRA - it may not be suitable for many reasons, but merely an example of what is possible out there.)
