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

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

Enough people responded to this thread defending the contributors.  Let
me defend the maintainer side a bit.

On Mon, 2008-08-04 at 11:46 +1000, Hal Ashburner wrote:

> 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?

That doesn't automatically bring five more maintainers to GNOME.  It
just increases overhead of maintenance, since now it's 5 packages that
need release instead of one.

> 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?

This already happens if there's enough developers willing to take
maintainership.

> 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.

So is the overhead of reviewing patches.  Creating a patch is actually
not much work.  Maybe 10 minutes if you know the code.  If it took you a
week, it's because you were learning in the process (learning SVN, code
reading, ...).  You spent most of your time learning new skills, and
that's so great about getting involved in GNOME: you learn for free.
Sure, at some point you want your exam graded so you know how good a job
you did, and I appreciate that, but implying that patch writing is so
much work and patch review is not, well, is not right.

> 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.

No.  You need to change your perspective.  Two years is not actually
that long in the grand scale of things.  For example, just a couple days
ago a seven-year old GTK+ bug was finally fixed.

> However not to at least 
> acknowledge receipt is just plain, old-fashioned, downright rude.

Why?  I mean, bugzilla definitely acknowledges that your submission was
received.  If the maintainer doesn't have any useful information to add
right away (like asking questions about the bug or the patch), a comment
would be just noise.

Now, if the bugsquad team wants to add a comment thanking the submitter,
that would be nice.  But saying that lack of a comment is rude, is IMO
not right.

On Mon, 2008-08-04 at 08:27 +0200, Jaap A. Haitsma wrote:

> 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

Please don't.  Add a comment to bugzilla or write to mailing list, bu
personal mail is typically not appreciated.  You may get a result the
first or second time, but more than that becomes really annoying.


Cheers,
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759