15 Feature Requests

From time to time someone will wander into the mailing list or our IRC channel saying something like "ya know, SXEmacs is cool, but it would truly rock if it had fooble-klangers. How ’bout it guys? Can somebody please add fooble-klangers to SXEmacs?".

That’s a Feature Request.

It doesn’t matter what a fooble-klanger is. It doesn’t matter if having said fooble-klanger would make SXEmacs rock or not. What DOES MATTER is that we acknowledge the request. And we acknowledge it quickly.

So how quick is quickly? Anything greater than 48 hours is slow. We should try to get an initial ack out within 24 hours of the feature request hitting the mailing list⁵. I totally understand that the 24 hour turn-around won’t always be possible. Often there’ll be extenuating circumstances (I’m writing this right now in the middle of a 2 week period with no internet connection).

The acknowledgment doesn’t need to be anything more than just that, an acknowledgment. You don’t need to have a 100,000 lines of working code that proves how much fooble-klangers make or don’t make SXEmacs rock before you let the guy know that he isn’t talking to a brick wall.

A feature request can only end up in one of 3 scenarios...

1. Implemented code.
2. Discarded idea.
3. Forgotten about.

Of those, #3 is UNACCEPTABLE! That means, if you see a feature request that is more than 48 hours old and hasn’t been acknowledged, it is YOUR responsibility to do something about it.

A feature request on our Issue Tracker is a issue that has the FeatReq flag set and the severity set to enhancement.