On Wed, 2010-06-16 at 16:39 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > Wish I knew. I'm not a devel and have no insight into how their minds > work :-) In fact I thought I had filed a BZ report a long time ago but I > can't seem to find it. Feel free to file it yourself and post the BZ > number here for others to add comments.
Here's some insight, at least from my perspective: There are 4698 outstanding bugs on file for Evolution and related modules, of which 1452 are enhancement requests. The bug backlog spans ten years, far longer than most of us have even been on the team. There are four, maybe five full-time developers left (myself included) and we all work for open source companies that have their own products to be maintained, which takes priority over "upstream" development (which, I think it's safe to say, we all prefer doing). I'd say at least half of the roughly one million lines of the code we're maintaining was written by developers no longer on the team. When I have time for upstream development and I'm not already engrossed in some mini-project for an upcoming release [1], I turn to my "bugs" folder which holds emails Bugzilla sends me when a new bug is filed or an existing one is updated. The mails are sorted by date and I tend to pick from the top, which means new bugs and noisy bugs tend to get my time and attention. Bugs that aren't resolved immediately and go silent usually get lost in the stack as new bugs stream in: out-of-sight means out-of-mind. I think my work flow is fairly typical of all of us. Best way to get our time and attention is to add constructive comments to the bug. Evolution being an open source project obviously source code patches are ideal, but also helpful are screen shots, click by click reproducer steps, complete gdb back traces or valgrind logs (for the more technically savvy reporters)... and for enhancements: UI mock ups (even if hand-drawn and scanned), algorithmic steps, thinking through corner cases... basically anything that makes the bug easier to solve. Or just ask what you can do to help. It doesn't guarantee an immediate response -- we're all swamped -- but it at least puts the bug back on top of our "bugs" folder where we're more likely to flag it to come back to later. What not to do: - Post obnoxious or nagging comments about the bug not being fixed yet. - Post "me too" comments, especially of the form "I still see this bug in $SOME_UNSUPPORTED_VERSION". If you're not running at least the latest stable release (currently 2.30.1), don't bother commenting. - Post the same stack trace over and over. As long as the first trace has all the debugging info we need, you're good. If we need another trace, we'll ask. - Raise a bug's priority or severity setting in hopes of getting our attention. Those fields are meaningless to us for the most part precisely because anyone can come along and change them. I hope this is somewhat helpful or enlightening. [1] http://live.gnome.org/Evolution/Planning30 _______________________________________________ evolution-list mailing list [email protected] To change your list options or unsubscribe, visit ... http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
