Leo diebuche@gmail.com writes:
*Quote: "Respond to contributions immediately." This is what I think bugs me the most. There are heaps of bugs which have had patches attached for month or years. For newcomers, who maybe spent a lot of time on these, it's just rude to neither commit them nor explain why they can't be committed immidiately.
This is one of the things I've been trying to do as the new Bugmeister.
Every day, about 20-30 bugs are created. Especially in those cases where the bug reporter is not a MediaWiki developer or regular user of Bugzilla, I try to make sure that they hear back from me, even if it is just “Thanks for reporting this, I'll try to make sure someone looks at it.”
But, to your specific complaint about patches submitted through Bugzilla, I like Diederik's suggestion:
Have a bugathon where we label a lot of bugs as appropriate bugathon bugs that need either: a) test patch / update patch to recent svn version a) confirmation / replication of new / unconfirmed bugs
In fact, although I've been focused on the 1.17 release, I've also been thinking about the 1.18 release. This would be a great way to start addressing the creeping normalcy[1] that people have experienced with MediaWiki. I definitely want to have one or two of these bugathons during the next release cycle. If there is enough interest, perhaps we can plan something for Berlin.
The other thing that will help is making more releases more often. This is one area that I want to use my new role within the community: until now, no one has been expected to make sure MediaWiki releases are made “early and often” and we were all happy enough to focus on writing new code while making software relases someone else's responsibility.
More frequent releases communicate vitality to software developers.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normalcy