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

["Jaap A. Haitsma" <jaap haitsma org>]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 3:46 AM, Hal Ashburner <hal ashburner gmail com> 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(!)
>
> 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.
Hal,

What I normally do if one of my patches doesn't get reviewed is sent
the maintainers directly an email with the question if they can review
my patch. Usually they've just missed the bug report, because they get
to much bugmail. After sending them the personal note the bug usually
gets picked up

Jaap