Re: [gnome-love] Does gnome hate me and want me to go away?

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Reply to set to the proper mailing list; gnome-love has nothing to do
with this.

On Mon, 2008-08-04 at 11:46 +1000, Hal Ashburner wrote:
> So I've just found (Ken & friends work?) 
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/reports/patch-report.cgi?product=gnome-utils&patch-status=none
> 
> Eleven unreviewed patches for the screenshot applet.
> Literally half of these are unreviewed after more than 2 years(!)

wow, I'm shocked! I wonder who's that lazy maintain... wait.

I am.

it's interesting to note that 11 unreviewed patches are quite a small
number: there are many modules with a higher count of unreviewed
patches, and most of them are very well maintained.

it's true: the amount of time I can devote to maintaining gnome-utils
has gotten smaller, due to work (both ${DAY_JOB} and on other modules in
the stack). it's not like gnome-utils is such in a bad state that it
requires high levels of maintainership. what it really requires are new
modules to replace gnome-system-log and gfloppy with something better
written/maintainable and more useful.

> This seems to me like pretty good evidence that the maintainers of 
> "gnome-utils" haven't got the time required to look after the package 
> properly. I'm sure they don't mean to be so rude to the people who spent 
> their time fixing bugs but ultimately intentions alone don't get things 
> done.

no, you're wrong: I'm being rude to you.

whom I've never heard of.

common courtesy would be to mail me personally, as the maintainer, and
use the gnome-utils mailing list to push the patches to a broader
viewership.

> Does it make sense to break gnome-utils up into individual packages for 
> each app or applet to make the workload for each smaller?

I considered this, and at the end of the day there are no maintainers
stepping up to do the job on the sub-modules of gnome-utils, except for
gnome-search-tools (which is maintained by the awesome Dennis Cranston)
and baobab (which is maintained by dynamic duo of Fabio Marzocca and
Paolo Borelli). I maintain gnome-dictionary, and try to fix
gnome-screenshot here and there. gfloppy and gnome-system-log are
completely unmaintained and rely on the kindess of strangers.

> How can we get some fresh faces onto this to get things happening again? 

mail patches to me, and to the gnome-utils-list. take complete
responsability for a sub-module by making it always compile. review
bugs. apply for a SVN account. stick around. at that point *you'll be
added to the maintainership team for gnome-utils*.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net