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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

For example, Geo-Django, a very unessential part of a web application was merged into trunk with no explanation as to why. There are lots of essential things things missing, I really don't see why Geo-Django has to be in there in the first place, and why with such urgency.

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You make it sound like Geo-Django was written in lieu of working on other features. Geo-Django is a contrib app and was championed by Justin Bronn who isn't a core contributor. It was included because it's very helpful to some people and if you ever need GIS stuff you'll be thankful to Justin. If you don't need it you'll notice nothing different--don't import anything inside of django.contrib.gis and you won't even experience feature bloat. Most people don't use all of the contrib apps on every site, but it's nice that they are there when you need them.

I guess Geo-Django is essential to Holovaty's work in EveryBlock, perhaps that's why it got more attention.

EveryBlock doesn't use GeoDjango.

Then WHY is geodjango in Django! Why is there no useful explanation as to why so many things in Django are "Design Decision Needed", but GeoDjango got accepted with no questions.

Because it was on the http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/VersionOneFeatures "maybe" list (as in it will go in to 1.0 if someone does the work to get it ready), and someone did the work to get it ready.

As to how things got on that list, that's why Django has BDFLs. Someone has to make these decisions. If you wanted to influence those discussions, the time would have been several months ago on the django-developers list. If you want to influence future decisions, join that list and start arguing for them.

I imagine part of the problem here is that most of the work on 1.0 is being done at in-person sprints. Anyone can attend these, but if you aren't there you miss out on the discussions about what's being worked on and what's ready to merge in to trunk. Because the work is being done in one place, there's less published communication about it on the mailing lists.

The up-side of the sprints is that they're incredibly productive, as you can see by looking at the amount of high quality checkins they generate.

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