Toby Bartels wrote:
Under Phase II, we used [[Bug reports]] and [[Feature
requests]]
not merely to list desired features and undesired bugs
but also to talk about them in a wiki way.
I can assure you, that was completely untenable. The pages quickly
because so long and unwieldy that they were hard to edit; half the time
they got truncated by someone with a buggy browser; it was hard to find
some particular item of interest; something that didn't get implemented
got quickly lost and forgotten in the huge pile of text...
Good riddance.
Under Phase III, we instead use SourceForge for this.
But SourceForge doesn't lend itself to discussion.
If you login with your e-mail address, any comments tacked onto your bug
report/feature request are e-mailed directly to you. If that's not
lending to discussion, what is?
Because Lee is essentially the only programmer,
he will close an entry there if he doesn't want to do it.
Of course, we know that he's willing to be convinced,
but there's not much chance of that if there's no discussion.
I also check those fairly regularly, and can and have reopened items
where I disagree with Lee.
There are alternatives.
[[Bug reports]] and [[Feature requests]] still exist,
but nobody has used them since the change,
and I doubt that very many people are watching them.
Thank goodness!
Much discussion of features has taken place on this
list,
but that doesn't reach nearly as wide an audience as before.
Most people that submit an item to SourceForge
aren't going to think to take it up on the list.
In short, I think that we miss the discussion that we had in Phase II.
We need a place for people to submit items for Wikipedians' approval
other than SourceForge, but we need to use SourceForge too.
Ideas?
Some have suggested bugzilla; I have no experience with it, nor do I
know whether it will be any easier than the Sourceforge tracker to deal
with.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)