hi harish, Am Mittwoch, den 18.10.2006, 22:13 +0530 schrieb Harish Krishnaswamy: > On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 15:10 +0200, Andre Klapper wrote: > > yes, but should poking really be necessary all the time? > > it ain't cool to *beg* for important stuff to get done, especially if > > the important stuff is not that hard to recognize (in bugzilla, we have > > target milestones, we have severity/priority - what else do we need? > > another wiki page, another mailing list rant/discussion as we had for > > the 2.6 UI changes?). > > My comment was to say that it helps to get things moving - it was not to > say that it is a necessary condition to have a patch reviewed. sure, in a perfect state, poking would not be necessary. but people expect to get answers in their bug reports, and not the need to write a private email or to ping on irc on them. (sidenote: evolution isn't the only gnome project where this does not work.) don't get me wrong, i have never stated that it would be "always" needed to poke - but i do think that it happens too often. i got used to write a private email to list important stuff, but this cannot become the default behaviour to get attention, and the more i did, the more i came up to the conclusion that something's obviously going wrong here. > Unfortunately, in the case of Evolution - important stuff *is* indeed > hard to recognize purely on the basis of severity/priority alone - > simply because the traffic is much more to handle than there are hands > and eye-balls. the bugsquad team triages about 350 evolution bugs a week (it was 100 half a year ago) currently so the developers only get those bugs that are valid stuff - and still there aren't enough hands and eye-balls, exactly what i wanted to criticize here initially. however, it's of course mostly not the developers' fault that they aren't enough people. the general state of evolution has become a bit better, but is far away from being perfect - see the ancient and missed target milestones, see the patch backlog, see the very small number of regular external contributors. i'm happy that we don't have that "oh, that sounds cool, let's target it to the next major release" bugzilla attitude anymore. but we're also still far away from a realistic "what can we really achieve in a 6 months release cycle with extremely limited manpower" attitude in bugzilla. i still stick to the fact that i would like to see more developer eye-balls on bugzilla, perhaps my impression is also an outcome of some missing transparency here (yes, we have team meetings - however, no logs are published, and /me and the entire gnome universe are still waiting for information on the 2.10/2.12 features and plans). > I do feel really sad about your comment. I would not term the friendly > nudge - as 'begging' nor I think you would have thought the same a few > days ago. well, sometimes it's a friendly nudge, but sometimes it really *is* begging (and no, this impression hasn't risen in the last days), if i have to poke an unresponsive maintainer three or even four times. this unresponsiveness kills potential contributors, and it really makes me *tired* as i have to spend a lot of energy and time on that. this was not meant as a generalization. however, it has happened way more often than i would liked it to have happened (i can search for bugzilla ID's or postings if you'd like to have explicit examples). on planet.gnome.org you've sometimes responded to other bloggers who complained that "filing evo bug reports or adding evo patches to bugzilla is useless as nobody reads them" (to summarize it in a cachy exaggerated phrase). that is what i refer to - the impression of people which exists for some reason. we currently sometimes have that "oh, somebody complains, so we now should finally take a look at that bug report/patch/issue" attitude. this would not happen if the developers would regularly take a look at the patches and the bug reports (again, note that i do not blame the developers here, i just describe "as it is"). customers would be more happy, and you do know that you already spend a lot of time on keeping customers happy. it also makes me really sad to read that you're feeling sad because of my posting. sorry. :-( > > > Andre has been approving i18n/Documentation related > > > patches for more than a release now. > > > i did because i was annoyed of waiting for nothing to happen, so this > > isn't an example of potential non-novell maintainers, but quite > > contrary: the reviews weren't fast enough or didn't take place at all, > > so at some point i told myself: well, even if i break something, why > > should i care? better to break something from time to time, then to not > > have any progress at all. > > If my memory serves me right, you had initially approached me and asked > if you could commit some of the patches that had not been looked into by > the team - prior to committing them. [...] > I do not remember you breaking any serious stuff. you're definitely right with regard to totally trivial typo patches, yeah. i refered to some non-trivial patches (many patches are non-trivial to me, as i don't know C ;-) where there wasn't a reply/review, though i had been poking for weeks. for example i remember that i introduced an easy-to-trigger-crasher in 2.7.91 by committing stuff just because i was tired of waiting. varadhan should remember that story, as he found out and correctly criticized me for that. :-) > > (no offense intended here, i'd just like to share my impression of the > > current state.) > > > I do acknowledge your feelings and sense of disappointment, agree on > more than one counts - but just do not understand the sweeping > generalizations that brush away a lot of good work with the rest. It is > saddening when it comes from a friend and somebody who has contributed > so much to this project. i don't think that this has much to do with disappointment. it has to do with dealing with other gnome projects for the last months and realizing that in order to "get important stuff done"(TM) for evolution, i have to spend much more energy than compared to other projects to get it done. i do not doubt that the evolution team is working damn hard and has accomplished lots of improvements. evolution has become so much better and stable through all those release cycles thanks to the great efforts of the maintainers and the few contributors. as written, it was not my intention to offend anybody - it's just that evolution is a damn huge project, which needs even more capacities and human ressources, and as things are now, the number of people working on evolution seems to be more and more reduced. i remember the days when there was a team for a component - now there's one or half a person working on one component, trying to get the same amount of work done. i know that most of you are working much more hours a week than many many people can even imagine, i know that some of you even work on evolution in their free time, and i really appreciate that passion. however, it seems that the existing human ressources aren't enough, because too many things still do not get the attention they should get (and i guess you can second this, if i rephrase it this way now). so it seems like i should have clearly stated the reasons, namely the small number of evolution developers combined with the huge number of tasks to do, instead of the results which led to some misunderstandings. however, the results remain the same, and the developers themselves cannot easily change it (again, that's why i wrote that this should not be considered as personally offending) - instead, they will have even more work to do if more people leave the developer team. perhaps more tension would be good for a project to really get some structural and workflow changes done, otherwise it's the old "hey, it's been working more or less for the last years, of course it could be much better, but anyway, it works" thingy. nevertheless, i should have taken care to not put all of that tension into one posting, it seems. :-) all the best wishes, and get well soon (as sankar told me that you're sick), your pal andre -- mailto:ak-47 gmx net | failed! http://www.iomc.de
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil