Maybe I'm being too ambiguous. Do we have any critical bugs? I don't think so. Yes, the ticket tracker might have unresolved "tickets". But just because we have stuff in our ticket tracker doesn't mean that any particular item actually needs or demands resolution.
As I have stated before, most bugs are found by users who have demanding needs, not casual users. If these bug finders don't have resources to fix the bugs that they find, who cares? Personally I have no economic sympathy for a user who has millions of hits per week or month and just spent time "upgrading" from a forked version of AOLserver to the current version only to discover "bugs". Why not pay someone to fix your problems? Instead, with the AOLserver community, you get a few hints of what to try for free! But if someone needs documentation, this is really not a community problem. Most community members know what they need to know and know how to ask about the things they don't know. By my estimate we get a handful of bugs per year. Almost everyone could continue to use AOLserver without any fixes to these bugs. How much organization do we need to deal with such an ideal situation? My guess is about as much as we have right now. One thing which make no sense to me is delegating documentation to those who didn't write and can't maintain the code they are trying to document. It isn't a matter of training, it is a matter of responsibility. If you want to maintain some code, you should also maintain the documentation. But, you know, sometimes documentation is satisfied by responding to user questions when they use your code. This is the highest form of documentation: maintain ownership and responsibility for the code you write, and respond to user queries. Personally I have no clue how we could recruit new community members who could contribute at an acceptable level compared to long term members who know all the ins and outs of the code. Just review how much effort is involved getting agreement among current members. Why would less experienced community members aid in code modification? Anyway, the basic problem is that there isn't much real work that needs to be done. Why is this so bad? tom jackson On Fri, 2009-05-29 at 19:20 -0400, Dossy Shiobara wrote: > To quickly summarize: > > 1) Dave Bauer identifies the "lack of anyone doing anything about [open] > bugs" and the lack of "process or resources to deal with the bugs" as a > problem. > > 2) Tom Jackson identifies that there's little in-community support for > would-be contributors to get their changes merged into the codebase. > > 3) Tom Jackson identifies that there is "a lack of documentation of all > kinds". > > Lets do a little wishful dreaming for a moment and brainstorm actionable > ways to try and address these deficiencies. Let me try to seed this > with a few questions: > > How can we find resources to deal with bugs, support contributors and > write documentation? What would it take to get existing contributors to > contribute more? How can we recruit new contributors? > > Would adequate funding aid in adressing these issues? In best-effort > accuracy round number estimates, what kind of funding levels would we > need to reach to achieve what kind of results? > > If training were provided, could we transform more passive community > members into more active contributors and supporters? What kind of > training would be necessary? What subjects would need to be covered in > order to enable what kind of contributions? > > ... > > Feel free to add more questions as appropriate, but especially answers > that have clear actions associated with them. I'll try to do my best to > collate the various actions and present them in a concise list. Then, > maybe we can try to find ways to make those things happen. > -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[email protected]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
