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 22:58 +0300, Paul Sokolovsky wrote:

> So, there's a bug tracker which doesn't get responses or even triaging,
> actually for months it's not even possible to submit a ticket at all.
> There's development mailing list, where it's barely possible to get a
> response from maintainers either. And yet there's "Russian speaking
> Jabber conference". Keep counting points on adequacy of such
> maintainership, Yury. Keep suggesting people maintaining their own
> forks, for years, like you did.

I'm not sure what you are driving at; the Jabber conference was not my
idea, and as I have already said, I think it was a *bad* idea.

I've just pointed out that it was the way it was, because you were
seemingly ignorant of this fact, apparently for not having closely
followed the development thus far.

Anyways, I would like to ask you to please drink a glass of water, take
a Prozaс or do whatever you usually do to calm yourself down: you are
barking at a wrong tree.

> One of the problems mc projects has is all this "infrastructure". It's
> stuck on the project model of 90ies. Gosh, it's hard, bloated,
> time-consuming, inefficient, leading to frustration. But you clutch to
> it and don't want to try the easy way, until people who support all
> that Sisyphus work ran out of resources.

As I have pointed out, the biggest problem is getting someone to invest
at least 20 hours per week in the maintenance. No matter how annoying
Trac is, so far, the bottleneck has been the time to review the patches,
as in read & think, not post the results of the review to the Trac.

> Other people gave early warnings that not everything is right with
> project maintainership, 

I would have been delighted if those well-wishers would have actually
done something more substantial than just wasting my time on the mailing
lists.

For example, one could have set up a script to import Trac tickets into
Github Issues. There are many half-way working scripts floating around,
but they need testing and fixing. Last time, Savannah import into Trac
took quite some effort, but it turned out to be very worthwhile.

Yet, I recognize that it's always easier to lay out great plans on the
mailing list and demand somebody else to implement them. Right?

> so one can only guess why it's unexpected to you.

If you knew that Andrew is going to be transferred to another department
you could have let me and others know in advance, but for one reason or
another, you didn't, and I'm not the one to blame for it.

> > I have personally publicly asked Egmont to take over the
> > maintaintership multiple times, however, he is understandably
> > reluctant to do so, and no one can force him to do it, if he doesn't
> > want to. It's his decision.
>
> Perhaps it should be done step by step, while simplifying
> "infrastructure". Initial steps are very easy:

Thanks for writing this up, except that it's pretty obvious anyways;
now, who is going to get all of this done?

Are you volunteering for it, or I have misunderstood your intentions?

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev