On Thursday, Oct 30, 2003, at 16:36 US/Pacific, Chris Seaton wrote:
I tried to start developing, but found myself largely ignored. I asked for suggestions as to where to start, what were the areas that needed work, but was just vaguely pointed towards the bug reports.
If someone had said you can do X - something attainable within a few hours - I would have probably been hooked.
What we need are bug fixes and performance improvements. Unfortunately this isn't very sexy; you need to have some familiarity with the code to understand how it works and track down the bits that don't work right or don't run well, and that's work:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_tasks
Instead, newcomers tend to want to add sexy new features that scratch their personal itches. These can be neat, but they also introduce new bugs and new slowdowns. We don't need new features right now. We need ugly, unpleasant grunt work that no one wants to do.
I made one commit to CVS, but it still hasn't gone onto the English Wikipedia (it was only one line).
We're *all* overworked. If something isn't getting done, you have to either do it yourself or speak up. In this case, speak up.
My pointers:
- Be very enthusiastic when someone comes forward
- Give them something to get hooked on
- Access to a test server
A public test server that won't wipe out our live server if something goes wrong would be great. Who wants to set that up? Lee at least did provide access to his server for this purpose, I don't know if that's still going on.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)