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

[Hal Ashburner <hal ashburner gmail com>]

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(!)

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.

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

How can we get some fresh faces onto this to get things happening again? 
Does gnome have a process to identify maintainers who've been snowed 
under by real-life and need someone to take over?
A thousand days for a patch being unreviewed is really just not in any 
way, shape or form anything like acceptable for a project such as GNOME 
that wants volunteers to contribute their time and expertise. The 
overhead of creating a patch is really quite high as it is, one would be 
tempted to think dark thoughts if one survives JHBuild/garnome as well 
as the codebase of interest, the RCS tools, testing etc only to feel the 
effort would have been better spent elsewhere.

If the above isn't possible should GNOME advertise that people are 
wasting their time fixing bugs in certain packages so as not to lead 
them on? Please note I'm saying nothing about the quality of these 
patches (or even my own), they could be abysmal. However not to at least 
acknowledge receipt is just plain, old-fashioned, downright rude.

The love has clearly gone missing*. So gnome-love, what say you all?

Hal

*I'm not saying that's anyone's fault or that they're nasty, malicious 
or anything silly like that. I'm sure they're kind to children and 
animals and like contributors etc. These things happen. Fixing them to 
make people feel like their work and time is treated with just a little 
respect would be some love from GNOME that would likely be reciprocated 
by newly arrived hackers.



Ken VanDine wrote:
> Hi Hal,
>
> Thanks for submitting the patch, it is appreciated.  There is a ton of
> patches in bugzilla that need review/validation.  This is exactly why
> the PatchSquad really needs to turn up the heat.  I will test this patch
> and comment on it.  Hopefully we can get it merged.
>
> Really... we do love you :)
>
> Thanks,
> --Ken
>
> On Sun, 2008-08-03 at 03:56 +1000, Hal Ashburner wrote:
>   
> > Dear gnome-love,
> > 2 months after I submitted this patch in bugzilla it hasn't been
> > reviewed or even looked at.
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166485
> > It really is a bug, it really does exist, this patch really fixes it
> > on my system. The code was painful to come to grips with as it uses an
> > X api that is undocumented. Yay. (Try man XShapeGetRectangles on your
> > system for a laugh, and note the code itself has no comment as to why
> > it's using XShapeGetRectangles which introduced this regression).
> > When kids like me fix a bug and it's ignored with no review, no
> > acknowledgement no nothing it really does blunt the enthusiasm to fix
> > more bugs. Maybe the maintainer is AWOL so bugzilla emails just ended
> > up in /dev/null, so s/he needs a replacement?
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-love mailing list
> > gnome-love gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-love
> >     
>
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