On 8/14/14, 3:35 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 14 August 2014 13:56, David Cuenca
<dacuetu(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It would be more sensible to let contributors
participate in the tech
roadmap in more formal and empowered way than now, because without that
early participation there is no possibility for later consensus.
A pattern we see over and over is that the developers talk at length
about what they're working on in several venues, then it's released
and people claiming to speak for the community claim they were not
adequately consulted. Pretty much no matter what steps were taken to
do so, and what new steps are taken to do so. Because there's always
someone who claims their own lack of interest is someone else's fault.
I actually have not found the "beta feature" feedback pages to be very
responsive. Is that what you had in mind? I've made an attempt to be on
top of these things and discuss them before the rollout, lest I come to
the party late and unhelpfully. But the beta-feature talk pages are full
of people with questions and problems and no responses or solutions, or
really any signs of life from anyone in a position to do anything.
On the plus side, I was driven by this frustration to figure out what
"git" and "gerrit" are. A simple bug in December rendered the beta
"Nearby" feature completely unusable for weeks. There were many comments
on the Talk page for that feature complaining that it had semi-recently
become completely broken. But nobody seemed to be acknowledging,
explaining, or making any effort to fix it. I eventually dug into the
matter and discovered that the recently introduced problem was obvious
and the fix was literally a 2-line patch. Then I spent about 1000x more
time than it took to author the 2-line patch to figure out how to submit
these two lines through git/gerrit bureaucracy. But being sufficiently
annoyed, I did manage to submit a patch, which was eventually applied,
and after some delay that fixed the brokenness. But that experience led
me to believe that nobody is really paying attention to beta feedback!
-Mark