On Tuesday 19 October 2010 22:25:03 Ximin Luo wrote: > On 19/10/10 21:20, xor wrote: > > [snip] > > > > Also, the fact should be mentioned that most of our money comes from a > > single, > > large donor and I don't want to imagine what would happen if they looked at > > our bugtracker so we should really clean the damn thing up while nobody has > > noticed that we give a shit about bug reports. > > > > - I am damn serious when I say "INSANE", we are in the science & computer > > age > > and yet we don't do proper project management at all. > > We should try to behave like engineers and not like children who always > > just > > run towards the next most colorful piece of candy. (Which we do, we > > continuously keep implementing new stuff instead of fixing the old stuff > > because > > programming new stuff is fun) > > I totally agree with this. I also think a major reason for it, is because of > the current attitude that toad/sanity have towards releases, namely that we > should try to get as much media attention as possible.
Please read my response to p0s's post before replying to the rest of this reply. > > I'm not saying that media attention is a bad thing, but we're letting it > affect > the development process too much. It puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on > these "colourful pieces of candy". IMHO Freetalk is strategically important, even in the complete absence of media attention. It greatly enhances the possibilities for anonymous community, and makes Freenet much more useful out of the box. As regards the rest I have explained my approach in the other mail - there are big strategic deficiencies in Freenet, particularly in security, performance and usability, and fixing these has to be the top priority before 1.0. More specifically with regards to the media: Freenet is still relatively small, and as far as we know lack of content remains the top reason why users leave, along with poor speed and lack of things to do (such as Freetalk). Continued funding for a full time developer is far from assured (I was amazed at Google's generosity for the third time, and it's in nobody's interest that it continues indefinitely, certainly not in Google's), and our continued existence as a legal project is in doubt both in the UK and US (arguably we are already illegal in France, thankfully nobody has been targeted yet). We therefore need to use the available resources efficiently, which to my mind means spending a significant proportion of our resources tackling the core problems rather than tinkering at the edges. Which doesn't mean no bugfixing or tidying until after 1.0 - that would be absurd - but it does mean we need to prioritise, and sometimes - quite often in fact - key features are more important than minor bugfixes. > > There's also the implicit attitude that more users will magically attract more > devs, who will magically bring good management to the project. I can't imagine > the logic behind this, there's too many jumps. Most developers start off as users. IMHO it is not unreasonable to hope that more users will result in more developers. It is also very clear that more users results in more content results in more users results in more content, that more performance, both in terms of raw speed and data persistence, results in more users. The same is true of ease of use, and of core functionality - which IMHO includes working searching, easy blogging, chat, and filesharing. Arguably project management is a separate question - but it is reasonable to focus on the things most likely to bring us closer to our goals as quickly as possible. In the broadest sense, with balance, which means that e.g. we need to take into account the effect of a change on potential developers as well as potential users. My goal for Freenet is to have it secure, fast, and usable, solving the substantial technical problems involved along the way, to have a lot of users (hundreds of thousands at least), and to build a global darknet (because IMHO the chances of a secure opennet are almost negligible, and a robust opennet is a contradiction in terms) - which again requires a lot of users and a lot of content. > > So, I think a good way to address the problem of the bugtracker would be to > re-think the current attitude towards releases. We want more users; however, > many things that are needed to sustain this project in the long run **won't > directly attract users** - doesn't mean we can skip or ignore them. Volunteer developers who do not depend on donation funding are very welcome to do all those things. However if I am to expend effort on stuff that won't get users, I will need to get value for money for my time. I hope that Ian can bring some insights here. > > TL;DR: balanced diet w.r.t. candy vs vitamins etc. > > X > > N.B I'm making judgements about "attitude" based on these quotes: > > - (21:50:45) sanity: infinity0: well, we get more devs in-part through > publicity, and also through users. a release helps with both of those thigns > - (22:49:17) toad_: infinity0: we can always change [the current messy API], > what matters is USERS > - (22:50:28) toad_: infinity0: why? code quality is not what gets us new users > - (22:53:53) toad_: [...] [major new feature]'s worth a month if it works and > gets us new users more rapidly when we do release > - (23:54:01) sanity: i think if we do [the release] right we can tell a very > interesting story about freetalk[...] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 197 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20101021/0e0bb506/attachment.pgp>
