I'll echo Andre here: the specific problem of patches from new volunteer devs which don't get timely responses is a real issue, and one which we have attempted to address (as Andre described) but an area we could probably still use additional ideas, accountability, etc for.
A secondary issue is that too much wiki dev is done by WMF/WMFDE employees (IMO); I don't think the current percentages lead to an overall healthy open source community. But (again in my view) the first step to nurturing and growing our non-employee contributors is to make sure their patches are timely reviewed. --scott
On Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 10:54 PM Andre Klapper aklapper@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi and thanks for joining the discussion!
On Sat, 2019-03-16 at 20:37 -0400, Thomas Eugene Bishop wrote:
Here’s a specific example, created in 2015:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T116145 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T116145%3E
A bug fix was provided years ago but never accepted or rejected. It’s the first and last MediaWiki bug ever assigned to me. I’ve just unassigned myself.
In cases like this, remarks like “Because you did not fix these bugs” and “... anyone is free to pick it up and work on it ... No further response needed” miss the point. When a bug fix is provided, but nobody with authority to accept or reject it ever does so, that’s a failure on the part of those who have authority, not on the part of those who are able and willing to fix bugs. Sure, volunteers are “free” to waste their time!
You need to use and share your authority more effectively, to “be bold” with accepting and rejecting bug fixes. Authorize more people to accept or reject bug fixes. Assign each proposed bug fix to one such person, starting with the oldest bugs. Then hold those people accountable. You don’t lack volunteers, you lack volunteers with authority.
I fully agree. I was referring to bug reports in my emails.
Code review is an area in which Wikimedia is very frustrating. There are regular emails about patches by new contributors awaiting review [1] but that obviously only covers a small group of contributors. And while we recently started to have code stewardship reviews [2] to fill some gaps in the list of responsible persons and teams [3] per code base, we for example still lack meaningful statistics how big the code review problem is, in general and per team.
andre
[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2019-March/091632.html [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_stewardship_reviews [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers -- Andre Klapper | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
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