On 8/14/14, 3:35 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 14 August 2014 13:56, David Cuenca dacuetu@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