Greg Stein wrote:
You get upset the first few times, after that you either get used to itOn Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 12:41:38PM +1100, Stas Bekman wrote:Jeff Trawick wrote: ...It's understandable. But it doesn't help to make other people want to contribute.As has been mentioned many times before on this list, if a patch isn't committed or commented on, you have to remind us. There are as many whys for this requirement as there are httpd committers trying to juggle multiple responsibilities. Consider us reminded, but not chastised. Many of us have been playing hookey through the holidays and have all manner of todos to catch up with.
Volunteers only have so much time to contribute. I don't think it is fair to get upset at people because they aren't providing you with enough of their time.
or move on.
I was simply trying to suggest a possible solution seeing it working for other projects. Which as you've explained later isn't applicable here.
[...]
Yes and no. You forget that there are many others who currently don't contribute to httpd, for various reasons you all know about. So while several developers indeed have a limited bandwidth, there is virtually an unlimited bandwidth if the entrance barrier is lowered and more people are encouraged to contribute.Others who submit things they have noticed wrong, but don't really require a fix, move on, when their posts/patches are ignored, so the efforts are just getting lost.
Quite unfortunate, but that is life. What more do you expect? People have limited bandwidth, and can only see and track so much. And that is also focused on "what is interesting to me". That is simply the way it works.
My simple document patch is a great example of something that could be handled by someone who doesn't have to be an expert in httpd-2.0. It's expected that a new committer may need to do some dirty/non-sexy/non-itch-scratching work while learning the guts of the project and working on enlarging his karma.
I'm not less busy than other developers. And I'm working pretty much on the same project, but a different segment of it. If you gave me the commit access, I'd have committed the fix long time ago and neither you or I had to spend time on this thread. I think I've posted enough small code and docs fixes in the last few years, so I can be trusted to commit simple things. Believe me that I'm not planning on committing anything that I don't know is simple and won't break the code. If you find me breaking things, you can always revoke the commit access. That's absolutely fair.Yes, it would be good to see every single patch, and to track every single one, but the developers are simply busy busy busy.
I was *not* implying that real responsibilities aren't real. I apologize if it sounded like I was. I was talking about things that people do at their spare time. And I was talking in general, and specifically about Jeff.You are talking about httpd committers having "multiple responsibilities", but I think you really mean "multiple itches to scratch".
Don't even start. You have no idea what kinds of responsibilities people have, so it is totally unfair of you to imply something else. Jeff says he has a bunch of other responsibilities. Great. He does. Don't try and tell him or us that he doesn't, unless you happen to stand in his shoes, too. The real truth is that Jeff works for IBM and part of his job responsibility is to work on Apache. Great for us. But his efforts are going to be extremely bound to the commercial needs of IBM. Certainly, there is a personal component over and above IBM's needs, but then you're really moving into personal interests. And you can't claim that time for yourself; that's Jeff's time.
It's pretty well known that people want to work on things, that they enjoy, at their spare time. That's what I meant.
In fact, the authority is getting more distributed in the current Perl project. Where there are several developers who are responsible for sub-projects of the Perl core, and they are benevolent dictators on their territories. The pumpkin only handles so much load because others didn't step front and took over other territories.Perhaps the httpd project could benefit from having a pumpkin, similarThat isn't part of our culture. I don't think it would work here. The httpd group doesn't have any notion of central authority, so a pumpkin isn't going to receive the kind of mandate that Perl pumpkins get. And there isn't a Larry here to bestow the pumpkin title on anybody. Central authorities definitely help with moving projects forward, but you can't simply swoop in and impose such a thing.
But since you say that this approach is futile at the httpd project, I won't waste our time on this.
Again, this is all true, because you artificially limit the number of available people. Though it's true that as the number of committers grows it's somewhat harder to run the project....
If that was the case, things (especially simple ones like my patch) won't fall between chairs, leading to more inspiration from users to help.
It could, but it also (obviously) requires somebody to track the incoming patches, analyze them, assess their cost/benefit, and then to apply them. The time that people have and are making available to httpd doesn't seem to be satisfying your notion of "timeliness". What do you suggest? That people are required to put in more time to get to your patch? Where is that time coming from? People are a limited resource. When you stop to consider their desires and what they choose to work on, then the amount of time available to any particular endeavor is going to be limited.
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