Feel Free was the motto of the TigerLily development team, and has been coopted to be used for much of lily development.

I've also seen this same sentiment expressed as "Patches Welcome!" in other projects, and have said this very thing myself earlier in lily-dev today. I just saw something not entirely unrelated: How to ask questions smartly.. it's only tangentially related, but it's a gnifty read

As is the case with many open source projects, there are a limited number of people with CommitPrivs to lilyCore. None of them does this as their full time profession, so it's hard to take a bunch of suggestions from various users and meld them into something cohesive. Also, lily is old enough these days that much of it could stand a rewrite... but that's often painful in relation to adding one more wart on an already horribly disfigured face that... perhaps I take the analogy too far. =-)

In any case, with the advent of the wiki for lily, and the regime change which occured a few years ago, this attitude is still around, and rightly so. While it should probably be phrased "Please develop an RFC so that I may critique it", it's often used as a way of trying to get people who are providing good suggestions to provide them in a more rigorous manner. Mentioning something on lily-dev in RPI isn't likely to last unless it catches someone's eye. Putting together an RFC in the Wiki for the ServerDevelopers to poke at is going to be much more effective. I can't stress this enough: ShareAndEnjoyTheWiki. And, if you happen to actually generate MOO (Or psuedo) code to go along with that, if your idea IS a good one that fits in with the design (again, as much as a system in lily's current state can be said to have one.), then it's that much easier for the developers to move forward with the idea.

It does NOT mean that your idea will not be considered if you don't supply a fully working patch. It just means that the more thought and documentation that goes into the idea, the more likely it will be to be used.

Hope this clears things up a bit. Perhaps there should be a node on CreatingRFCs^?, as part of the DevelopmentMethodology^? to help make this more accessible. As one of the ServerDevelopers, I certainly don't want to sound like I don't want new ideas (ESPECIALLY ideas about how to clean up the code base). I just want folks to be able to present their ideas in the most usable fashion.

-- CoKe - 18 Dec 2003
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