Re: "mc is over!?" - post by Ilia Maslakov on Russian-speaking IT site

["Yury V. Zaytsev" <yury shurup com>]

On Wed, 2015-05-27 at 18:42 +0300, Mooffie wrote:

> Second, Andrew Borodin has been doing a tremendous (and fantastic)
> work of cleaning up the code. People perhaps aren't aware of this. It
> won't be right to say that MC stagnates.

Andrew was one of the best maintainers that I have seen so far, his work
is deeply appreciated and he will be dearly missed. 

> Until a year or two ago I was convinced MC's development was financed
> and steered by the Illuminati...

This was actually quite close to the truth at some point, but sadly the
circumstances have changed now, as Slava has explained.

> I'd guess, based on my own experience, that people (that is,
> programmers) are simply not aware of MC's predicament. After all, how
> would they? There's no sign for that unless one stumbles upon specific
> posts here.

I don't think it's so easy; I have personally witnessed mc has dying at
least twice, and the problem is simply that it's extremely hard to find
someone how would commit at least 20 hours per week to a project for
years without getting paid for it, because people need to sustain
themselves in some way, and even part-time volunteering is no walk in
the park.

Of course, mc still has a large following of users that test the code
and report bugs, and some of them even go as far as to suggest patches.
However, most of these patches cannot be applied verbatim, but have to
be fixed, and, at very least, reviewed. Still, many are unsurprisingly
of a very high opinion of their own code, and would be happy to commit
it directly to master, if they only get a chance. The amount of effort
that it takes to review the patch, and fix it if it's of unacceptable
quality is simply not appreciated, but, unfortunately, this doesn't
happen by magic, but rather through huge recurring investments of time.

The problem really is to find someone who is not only going to commit a
few patches and be gone with the wind, but rather a person who will
review the patches even in the case that he/she doesn't have personal
interest in it. Someone who will carefully review contributions, fix
them where appropriate and get them merged, like Andrew did. Someone who
will triage bugs in the Trac, check if they can be reproduced, and fix
them even if he/she doesn't suffer from them personally. Preferably,
someone who is not deeply deranged and is capable of basic communication
with humans. Someone who is ready to commit at least 20 hours per week
to this cause on a regular basis (read years).

Anyone?

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev