Re: GNOME TODOs

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 04:09:29PM +0200, Kjartan Maraas wrote:
> tor, 2002-09-26 kl. 17:48 skrev Malcolm Tredinnick:
> > On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 01:36:21PM +0200, Matthias Warkus wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > just one question: How current and how useful ist
> > > http://www.gnome.org/todo/index.php3? Does it make sense to mention
> > > this as a place to go if one wants to help with developing GNOME?
> > 
> > No, please don't. We get questions about things on this list all the
> > time on gnome-love and have to keep redirecting people. The list is very
> > out of date and unmaintained.
> > 
> > Without a designated maintainer who will transfer information from
> > bugzilla and mailing lists to the todo page, I have little hope that it
> > will become useful in the near future, either. :-(
> > 
> 
> Would it be possible in the future to have a checkbox in bugzilla to do
> this automatically? Or just a TODO keyword and have some magic
> incantation extract the title and description of the bug and place it in
> the todo-list?
> 
> Sounds useful to me at least...

Look, I completely agree with this. I also agree with people who think
the list should stay around and should be maintained. However, the fact
of the matter is that it is _not_ maintained and it _is_ woefully out of
date. And yet people still look at it and ask on gnome-love (in
particular) or IRC if task X is taken -- only to be told it was done a
year ago or is no longer relevant or whatever.

Right now, at this moment, the page should die to avoid misleading
people. If/when magic is added to bugzilla to compile the TODO list
(which sounds like a really good idea), or when we require module
maintainers to have an up-to-date TODO file that we can put up
automatically or whatever, then let's do it.

I'm not flaming anybody's suggestions here, but I have received a few
people mailing me privately about this comment also and I need to spout.
As somebody who answers a bloody lot of questions from newbies on help
and development lists, I have a selfish interest in making sure old,
stale information is confined to the dustbin just to save on my own
keystrokes.

OK, I'll probably regret this mail later. For now, I need to go out for
a morning coffee.

Malcolm