Re: Happy 20th Birthday!

[Egmont Koblinger <egmont gmail com>]

Hi Slava, Yury, others,

I'm not a native English speaker either and hence often my intent doesn't go through clearly.  In no way did I mean to blame anyone for mc development slowing down, quite the opposite, I'm so grateful for you guys maintaining this really essential piece of software!  I just wanted to point out that probably it's time to think about ways to boost up development.  I totally understand that people's motivation in maintaining the software fades out through the years as they have fixed the major issues, and their personal lives have moved forward.

I myself don't maintain any code the way you do (taking responsibility), I'm just one step behind, being a contributor here and there, and I'd like to remain in this position (which may or may not include git access).  I'm happy to fix some pet peeves of mine, maybe I'd fix a bit more than that if I had commit access, but I'm not the one who'll systematically go through the bugs and fix the important ones one by one.  (E.g. just for one, personally I hardly care about VFS.)

Also, a couple of disagreements between me and some maintainers recently makes me wonder if it would work out if I had commit acces... I mean, I really wouldn't want to go against the decision of other members, there'd still need to be an agreement among us.

I'm glad to hear that you'd welcome me in the team... but some annoyances, e.g. last time me having a firm "no" vote for the 4.8.13 release and yet it being released (without any discussions) makes me wonder if the twose two guys who went ahead with the release really would welcome me.  I think the normal tendency is that you begin to submit valuable contributions, the team starts to recognize and appreciate to you and listen to what you say, and after a point they grant you access.  I'm glad you'd give me commit access, but some other developers have not yet reached the point where they'd listen to my arguments -- I wonder if it could work this way or the situation could be changed.  I really don't know.

Another example is #3250 where a complete reimplementation of the viewer brings a minor regression in the least used feature, while fixes many noticeable bugs.  If I had commit access, I'd go ahead and commit it.  But I hear voices that claim a new minor regression as a price for many important bugfixes is unacceptable.  So what now?  I don't know.

As for the "logistics": I'm not a chat/irc guy, I prefer bugtracker conversations, or occasional chat/irc (but then preferably skype) if there's something specific to discuss interactively.

As a side note, I just started a new job recently, so I won't have too much spare time nowadays.

Anyway, I'm glad I could at least start a conversation.  Let's keep it alive and think about possible ways to boost up development :)

cheers,

egmont

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 12:01 PM, Yury V. Zaytsev <yury shurup com> wrote:

On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 21:07 +0100, Egmont Koblinger wrote:
>
> The initial passion from the new maintainers has faded.  They hardly
> have time to work on the project.  Many patches or important
> bugreports go unnoticed for long months or even years.  Some tickets
> have heated technical discussions between some non-maintainers, yet
> the maintainers remain silent.  Some contributors have already
> expressed that they've lost motivation due to the lack of response
> from developers, and alas more (including myself) are likely to
> follow.  (This whole issue has been raised in [5].)  I really don't
> know how this problem could be solved... I'm just hoping that we'll be
> able to figure out something.

Hi Egmont,

I was thinking of replying, but Slava has beaten me to it. In a way, I
guess it's all pretty simple...

Speaking of me personally, all the bugs that were annoying the hell out
of me are in some way resolved now thanks to the very impressive
contributions by Slava's team, including Andrew and Ilya, and, on the
other hand, I simply haven't got any "spare" time in the last 3-4 years.

I've been trying to fix minor things in the mean time, but bug triaging
is not fun in many instances, because some individuals prefer to express
themselves in a very agressive format. I don't know if this comes from
the fact that they are simply unable to fathom some peculiarities of the
English language and thus are genuinely unaware of what it sounds like
in a conversation, or it's just the way they roll... but anyways,
whereas I can tolerate it from say Linus Torvalds due to his brilliant
technical acumen, my knee-jerk reflex to some douchery from Joe R.
Hacker would be just "fuck you". So, this plays some role too...

Anyways, as Slava said, the main issues are a) general lack of resources
and b) most personal itches have been scratched by the current team
members, but they do welcome new members. Logistically, that's a bit
difficult because the current development chat is in a jabber room and
happens in Russian, but this is not a problem that can't be solved.

Are you personally interested in becoming a committer ;-) ? You've made
quite some amazing contributions in the past, like 256-color support,
which I am really enjoying every day.

--
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev