Hi!
> 1. My impression is that there's agreement that there is a huge backlog. Obviously, there is a backlog. As for it being "huge", it's subjective, for someone who has experience with long-running projects, having thousands of issues in the bug tracker is nothing out of the ordinary. Does it make the backlog "huge"? I don't know, depends of what is "huge". > 2. I think that there's consensus that the backlog is a problem. I'm not sure where such a consensus came from. Of course, bugs not being resolved immediately is not the ideal situation - ideally, the bug would be fixed within hours of submitting it. Nobody thinks it can really happen. Any large popular long-running project has more bugs and wishlist items than it can implement. There are always more users than developers and more ideas than time. Thus, the backlog. Of course, ignoring the backlog completely would be the problem, but I don't think we have this situation. It's likely we could do better. But I think we know the backlog exists, and its existence by itself is not a problem, or at least not a problem that can be realistically solved for such a huge project. > Regarding my own opinions only, I personally am frustrated regarding > multiple issues: > > a. that there's been discussion for years about technical debt, I'm not sure why it's the source of frustration for you. Having discussion about technical debt is great. Of course, it should also lead to fixing the said debt - which I think is happening. But expecting that starting some magic date we stop having technical debt or the need to address it as realistic as deciding starting today our code won't have bugs anymore. > b. that WMF's payroll continues to grow, and while I think that more > features are getting developed, the backlog seems to be continuing to grow, Of course. How it could be any other way? With more features, come more places that can have bugs (you don't expect WMF to be the only software developing organization in the Multiverse that writes code without bugs?) and once people start using them, they inevitably ask for improvements and have ideas on how to extend it, thus adding more tasks. Expecting that more functionality would lead to less issues in the bug tracker is contrary to what I have experienced over my whole career - it never happened, unless the project is effectively dead and the users have moved away. > f. that I think that some of what WMF does is good and I want to support > those activities, but there are other actions and inactions of WMF that I > don't understand or with which I disagree. Conflicts can be time consuming> > and frustrating for me personally, and my guess is that others might feel > the same, including some people in WMF. I don't know how to solve this. I I don't think it's possible to "solve" this. Unless you are appointed the Supreme Dictator of WMF, there always would be things that WMF does and you disagree. And so would be the case for every other person who cares about what WMF does. We just need to find things that we can do that a lot of people can use and not too many people disagree, but there's no way to guarantee you won't disagree with anything (for any value of "you"). I think we already have processes for finding this kind of kinda-consensus-even-though-not-completely. As all processes, they are not ideal. They can be improved with specific suggestions. But expecting that nobody (and any specific person in particular) would ever think "WMF is totally wrong in doing this!" is not realistic. Reasonable people can and do disagree. Reasonable people also can work through disagreements and find common interests and ways to contribute to mutual benefit. I think that's what we're trying to do here. -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
