"Neil Kandalgaonkar" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > On 5/31/11 3:20 PM, MZMcBride wrote: > >> taking a page out of the rest of the business world's book, you set a >> deadline and then it just fucking gets met. No excuses, no questions. > > I think you have an optimistic view of how businesses actually work. :)
The only modification needed to bring that sentence in line with business reality is adding "it just fucking gets met **or someone's head rolls**. > But, in any case, in a business, there is a Plan that everyone is trying > to follow and in theory, deviations from that Plan are avoided. In our > environment we want to be responsive to the schedule of a volunteer > developer, who may be completely unaware or uninterested in our plans. Plenty of businesses work on a rolling-development model, probably more businesses than have totally static specs. The difference between that and WMF, and even between WMF and other non-businesses like Linux and Mozilla, is that if a release is mandated by some higher power and something is holding up that release, **whatever it is gets steamrollered out of the way**. If there is a clear roadmap that says that any feature that's not debugged and ready-to-go by Wednesday morning, by the first Tuesday of the month, by the 32nd of June, whenever, then it gets reverted, no one is going to complain when lo and behold, such features get reverted. *Everyone* is going to complain if the 32nd of June becomes the 32nd of December before the feature even makes it onto the cluster. > Perhaps the answer is that we have to give the volunteer developers some > obvious pathway to harmonizing their and our priorities. Like, if you're > working on files and multimedia, you should be emailing Bryan, me, or > maybe Tim or Russell. Could it be that simple? > > >> The >> problem seems to be finding anyone to lay down the damn law. > > Well, it's not like wiki pages happen by someone cracking a whip either. > That said, we would benefit from some urgency towards correcting the > problem. Wiki pages don't need a whip, and nor does MediaWiki. Wiki pages are *missing* several layers of delays and checkpoints in the volunteer-writes-something-to-volunteer-sees-it-in-use chain. MediaWiki is currently like a wiki with FlaggedRevisions turned on on every articlespace page, but with all the admins on the wiki working on other things such that no one gets round to cleaning out the Special:OldReviewedPages list more than once every *nine months*. That would kill a wiki community stone dead *pretty much instantly*. >"Brion Vibber" <[email protected]> wrote in message >news:[email protected]... > > Sing it, brother! We're getting *some* stuff through quicker within the > deployment branches, but not nearly as much as we ought to. The fact that some things are *not* getting stuck in the CR quagmire is part of the *problem*, not the solution. The upper levels of the developer hierarchy ***obviously know*** that the mainline CR process is substantially broken, BECAUSE ***THEY'RE NOT USING IT*** FOR THINGS THAT ARE IMPORTANT TO THEM. The unavoidable implication of that observation is that the work of the volunteer developers *DOESN'T* matter to them. Whether or not that implication is correct (I have confidence that it's not) is irrelevant, the fact that it's there is what's doing horrible damage to the MediaWiki community. --HM _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
