Havoc linked today in a discussion on bugzilla to a document he wrote three years ago about what features maintainers should consider adding to mature software. The central thesis is “ask ‘why’, rather than ‘why not'”. If we’re to have stability we can’t add features for the hell of it.
I wonder whether we could make a sort of checklist out of the list given there, and use it to measure rationales in feature requests (even those in patches!) as a sort of triage; if a request didn’t measure up, we could always send it back and ask them to address those points as well. I would seriously like to have a common policy across all requests so I knew my review was balanced.
