Re: roadmap status update/update request

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 10:21 -0800, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
> 
> Havoc, about users writing docs and analysis when they want a particular 
> feature: *I am* going to write such an analysis for each one of my 20 
> feature requests and then file them on bugzilla. Then, I will sit back and 
> watch how many of these bugzilla entries, if any, ever get a response from 
> its respective maintainer, let alone get realized in the next 1 year. My 
> experience so far with feature requests on Gnome is that they are getting 
> completely ignored and devs just do the few things they want to do for 
> themselves (except when there's a Sun/Novell/RH corporate decision to 
> develop something specific), and that's that.

And you're exactly right, that is the situation. I can tell you that
without running the experiment of putting stuff in bugzilla.

Red Hat, Novell, Sun, even Ubuntu are paid to listen to those customers
who pay them, or those customers they would like to pay them. And they
schedule work based on that.

Developers not at a company do the things they want to do for their own
reasons.

Everyone already has a 10-year backlog of work for paying customers,
potentially-paying customers, and things-they-would-personally-find-
interesting. So no, other things aren't going to happen. Welcome to
reality.

> Also, why have the devs get "angry" (as you said) for showing them a web 
> page with the most wanted features?

Most wanted features *by the people voting on the web page*

I've seen hundreds of web polls and read a mind-blowing number of
articles on Slashdot, LWN, LinuxToday, OSNews, etc. My estimate of
overlap of the priorities of posters to these sites with Red Hat's
enterprise customers is 5%. My estimate of the overlap of the priorities
of posters to these sites with "average corporate or home desktop user"
is 5%. I am not exaggerating.

>  I TAKE  MAJOR OFFENSE as a user and a 
> Gnome advocate & supporter, you telling me that the developers of a 
> particular product don't even want to HEAR about what their users need.

We do, but we have better ways to find out than web polls.

I'm interested in what your features are, because I like as much data as
possible. But I'm not going to be surprised or think it reflects any
fundamental breakage in GNOME if nobody gets around to those features.
There are only enough developers to implement maybe 1% of what gets
requested.

Havoc