On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Antony Stone wrote:
I think it would be helpful / polite if the people who make the decisions
about whether to implement these things would:
a) close down the list if they don't intend to do anything with the ideas
expressed there
I'm leaning towards putting my vote on this suggestion. At least as it works
today. I'm thinking perhaps it'll serve its purpose better if only developers
can create new entries in that list.
b) respond to the posting which are deemed "pointless or crappy and will
never be implemented" so that at least people know that, and they don't hang
around for years as open requests on the list.
This is the problem. We're a very diversed community and even amount the ~65
committers we're very unfocused and we all have different priorities and ideas
on how to do things. This tend to have the effect that many feature requests
have at least one fan and thus won't be closed. Then there's the flood of
ideas that "might possibly be good to a few" and then they aren't killed off
either. And so on. Killing tasks is a lot easier said than done.
On a similar vein, I can't quite work out what the system is for the bugs
tracker - once someone has posted a bug and confirmed the circumstances and
how to reproduce it, is there any mechanism for scheduling a fix into the
workstream, or allocating the fix to someone who knows that part of the
code, etc?
No, there is no such system and I wouldn't even know how to create such a
system.
Hopefully there's at least one dev caring for all bugs and when that developer
has time over and energy for it, the bug will get attantion. The better the
bug is reported and the easier it is to repeat it, the more likely it is that
it'll happen sooner. Of course it also depends on how critical said dev
considers the bug to be.
I know this is an open source project run by volunteer developers, and
nobody can be told what to do, but I'm just wondering what mechanism is used
to try to get action on confirmed bugs which are in the system?
The best way is to ask devs on IRC or on this mailing list to get their/our
attention on particular tasks you think are important/neglected.
Oh and of course widening the dev base by getting more developers "on-board"
and getting commit access is also helping.
--
/ daniel.haxx.se
