On Sun, 22 Jun 2008, Antony Stone wrote:
Personally I think it should be no harder than it is now for people to suggest
feature requests
I didn't say that, but I did mean that suggesting a feature shouldn't
necessarily mean it is worthy to get added to a persistent storage and clutter
up the space.
If the tracker would be restricted to developers for adding new entries, it
would thus require users to present their ideas to the developers in such a
way that he/she/they would add them. It doesn't make it harder to suggest
anything, but it does put some further requirements on the user to actually
think things through and to present their idea in a "selling" way.
I think you must start to see this problem from the developers' point of view,
as IMO the developers are what drives the project forwards the most. If we
improve things and smoothens the way to allow developers to work better and to
better find useful ideas, it will benefit the project.
Making it easier for bazillions of users to file their ideas that to the
largest extent will end up nowhere and that will clutter our the trackers and
make things harder for developers and thus instead just be a burdon to the
project and the developers. In this second scenario users would have a very
easy way to file their ideas yes, but it does not help the project. That will
then not please the users in the longer run.
I think the challenge is to make a tracker that contains fine quality ideas
for developers but yet be responsive enough to be able to absorb user's ideas
*when they are good*.
If you look at the feature requests posted to the tracker the last couple of
eyars, I think you'll notice that most of them are totally pointless. They
often fall in one of these three categories:
A) pointless request since there's an improvement most of the devs already
could think of themselves
B) far-out idea that no dev is interested in. New game-system ports etc. Also
these are of course easily thought of by everyone. Pointless. Or it could
also be major new stuff that some dev would want to do but is a huge
undertaking. Still pointless to ask for.
C) minor tweaks/different approaches to existing features. These are often
modified menu item positions, key mapping, naming. Mostly pointless, and
when not they are subject for debates and discussions that are better held
on a mailing list or forum or IRC anyway as the bug tacker is a lousy place
for discussions.
Can anyone even mention five good ideas (previously not discussed or thought
of) posted in the feature-request tracker posted during the last 3 years?
Three? one?
--
/ daniel.haxx.se
