On Sunday 17 June 2007, Richard Kakis wrote:
> It could be worse. They might close the bug as WONTFIX
within 24 hours.
> Yes, someone should contact you within 30 days.
"Someone should". Replace that by "I
will" 
> > Unfortunately, this is not how Free Software (and
specifically KDE)
> > works. You can't force people to fix bugs or react
to reports within
> > a certain timeframe -- most of the people are
volunteers after all.
>
> Volunteer != 'do what ever you want'.
Volunteer = Spending lots of time besides your day job on
something you love
and care about, and prepare being told by passive spectators
that you're
doing not enough, or the wrong thing.
(Well, there are lots of positive aspects to it as well,
otherwise people
wouldn't do it)
> If I volunteer to help Habitat for Humanity build a
house, I expect to
> be told what to do.
That never worked for OSS. The people who ask for jobs are
rarely the ones who
stay around longer and do sustainable work. This is just not
how
(self-)motivation works in OSS.
> I might be offered a choice of jobs, but anarchy
> doesn't really work in building a house. I don't see
how we should
> expect it to work here.
It's not anarchy. It's meritocracy. The only anarchic about
it is that the
volunteers decide what they work on and how much they work
on it.
> > That said, it's wrong to conclude from one bug not
being handled in a
> > timely manner that bugreporting is useless. There
are a lot of bugs
> > fixed every day (http://www.commit-diges
t.org/ has more details in
> > the statistics section).
>
> But, we do have a bug problem. Perhaps we need to
refactor our software
> engineering methods.
Go find methods, that
1) are appreciated by the contributors (the ones who do the
work), i.e. no
unecessary paperwork or other additional overhead.
2) work together with the current "workflow", the
motivation of contributor's,
the social structures and whatnot
2) scale for a big FLOSS project like KDE
3) actually improve something instead of causing just work
> This is really a lame excuse. If we are too busy
developing new stuff
> to fix bugs, we have a serious problem.
People working voluntarily on KDE4 don't need to apologize
to nobody for doing
that. FLOSS developers aren't resources you can manage like
employees. For
instance, if they decide to write a new multimedia framework
(which is
needed) they do that, instead of doing bug hunting in Arts
(pointless
long-term). If you want the same person to fix arts for
example, you'd
probably need to pay him/her loads of money.
Also, often it turns out to rewrite something from scratch
instead of fighting
to get some unmaintable piece of legacy code stable.
> Do we have a list called: howtohelp? Actually, it
seems that what is
> needed is a list for people to post requests for help.
Actually this is what this list is about, it just got an
unfortunate name.
In short: If you want to influence an FLOSS project like
KDE, join it and do
work on it. If you do good work, people might start to
listen to your
suggestions. Little steps and improvements here and there
will be probably
more successful instead of trying to tell people that they
all should switch
to methodology X tomorrow
Judging as a spectator how bad things are managed won't get
you nowhere.
Regards,
Frank
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