On 04/20/10 06:38, Jacob Meuser wrote:
On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 12:21:43AM -0700, J.C. Roberts wrote:
On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:58:02 +0800 Artur Grabowski<[email protected]>
wrote:
On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 2:02 AM, Christiano F. Haesbaert
<[email protected]> wrote:
I also know he (as every developer) is busy with more important
things, so "publishing" these small tasks would also give the
developers more time to focus on the big/important issues.
There are a bunch of assumptions here that are wrong.
Small tasks are the most fun to do because they satisfy the instant
gratification needs all of us have. I won't give you my list of the
"fun and easy stuff", I want to keep it to myself. The lists that are
published will contain "dull, heavy and not very important" tasks. The
kind that gets you burned out the quickest.
Also, todo lists have been published in the past leading to either no
reaction whatsoever or a bunch of people offering help and vampiring
the energy from whoever published the list without leading to any code
committed. It's easy to become slightly bitter about the whole thing
after spending hundreds of hours helping people who then don't follow
through when they realize that it actually requires work.
//art
Well said Art!
Additionally, some of the most "dull and heavy" tasks are not coding,
but instead, they are testing code/patches. There is no joy of coding
involved, and little gratification when at the end of your efforts all
you can say is, "It worked fine on X." The closest thing to excitement
you'll get is *if* you can find a bug.
Does anyone really rely on a 486 with an ISA bus? What about a vax or
similar esoteric system? Let alone use one regularly? Do these ancient
and odd systems really matter?
Having code run on multiple archs and lots of different hardware is a
well proven way to find important bugs.
The developers *CONSTANTLY* *ASK* *FOR* *YOUR* *HELP* with testing, but
this "dull and heavy" work is somehow below most people who just talk
about wanting to become developers and are looking for shortcuts to
becoming one.
Since validity is critical, if you cannot test properly and hopefully
help in the debugging, then you'll never be any good at writing code.
jcr
--
The OpenBSD Journal - http://www.undeadly.org
the non-sndio ports list I sent to ports@ recently (and which I have been
doing for months now) is a todo list. even just looking at the listed
ports as they are now, noting how well they currently work in an out of
the box configuration on your machine, checking if there are upstream
updates or if the homepage has moved or anything along those lines
would be helpful.
Looking at this and Peters message, I think there may be an answer much
simpler than a TODO list, which I think will never work out. If
developers wanted a TODO list, we would already have one.
In Ports, there are already the useful tags on emails of WIP, NEW,
UPDATE, etc
Perhaps the useful emails that have suitable TODO items could simply be
tagged with a TODO.
WIP TODO blah blah
UPDATE TODO blah blah
TODO blah blah
These would be exceptionally easy to search for. NO list, very simple
for anyone to add to an email.
