Voting/Scoring and final decision discussion

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, October 10, 2013 05:14:26 Jesse Phillips wrote:
> There is little documentation on how to handle the situation the
> Review Manager is currently facing. I would like to open this
> discussion to point out why, and to poll for if we should have
> any.
> 
> The reason is that our process comes from the the Boost review,
> and there is no such definition[1].
> 
> The way we have it makes it appear that the module is accepted as
> a majority vote. However that isn't the intention of the Boost
> process. The Review Manager wields a lot of power during the vote
> tally. The key line in our documentation:
> 
> "Tallies votes and decides if there is consensus to accept the
> library and under what conditions."
> 
> The Review Manager is trying to judge based on the input how well
> this library fits with the goals of Phobos and the D community.
> That doesn't mean a landslide victory is needed.
> 
> So with that I, and probably Dicebot, would like to hear feedback.
> 
> Dicebot, consider what information may help make your decision.
> Would yes votes including positive feedback help (it is easier to
> side with those providing an argument)?
> 
> 1. http://www.boost.org/community/reviews.html#Introduction
> "The final "accept" or "reject" decision is made by the Review
> Manager, based on the review comments received from boost mailing
> list members."
> 
> Boost doesn't do a review then vote separation.

I think that the vote needs to be clearly overwhelmingly yes for it to pass. 
Not everyone has to vote yes, and on some level it is the review manager's 
call as to whether the vote is heavily in favor of inclusion, but if the 
percentage of yes-es is high enough for inclusion, then that really should be 
clear to everyone involved that almost everyone is in favor. If it's at all 
unclear that almost everyone is in favor of inclusion, then I think that the 
module should fail the vote and have to be improved such that it will get a 
yes from almost everyone.

Clearly, we can't require a unanimous vote, but I think that it should be at 
least reasonably close to unanimous and that anything closer to 50% than 100% 
should definitely fail. Given that this is the standard library that we're 
talking about, we need to maintain a high standard, and anything that can't 
get at least a two thirds vote is suspect IMHO. And given how the reviews and 
voting have gone thus far, I'd be worried if it was even as low as two-thirds 
in favor of inclusion.

- Jonathan M Davis