[reportlab-users] Release 1.16 preparations and more contributors.

[Laura Creighton]

> We're new to this.  If anyone has relevant experience about
> managing dual-track projects, what works and what doesn't,
> now would be a great time to start discussing it.  

OFF The top of my head ....

Make sure you have a README which describes the differences between the
two tracks at a detailed conceptual level.  We are trying to speed
up X is probably not good enough.  We are trying to speed up X by
making these 4 classes use dicts rather than lists is probably Ok,
but you may need more detail.  The idea is to inform the poor soul who
is coming to hack a new thing when it is the case that he shouldn't write his
code the way the rest of the code looks, (which is what he will do
otherwise).

Strongly mark deprecated classes, functions, idioms, or you will never
stamp them out ....

Testing should be very automatic and easy.  Anything harder than
'make test' or 'make test all' will get skipped at the worst possible time.

Code that rejects new patches that do not have unit tests keeps everybody
honest.

Laura