Birgitte SB wrote:
The subject line pretty much sums this note up. I am frustrated with the continued lack of development support for anything where the propents are not actually developers themselves. I have aware for sometime that asking for anything without uploading a "patch" is absolutely useless. So I accepted people that don't know what a patch is are just screwed. But I have recently realized many of developments which have never happened *did* have attachments (which I think are "patches"). The bugzilla system really must be broken. Because how can these things just be ignored for so long? Here is the bug which had the most effort invested in it from WS.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4375
This feature was so desired by people Wikisource a show of support by 15 separte languages was orchestrated hoping it would have some effect.
As far as I'm concerned, Bugzilla is pretty much useless for getting the attention of developers. Subscribing to wikibugs-l will deliver incredible amounts of junk to your inbox, I don't know if anyone actually filters through it to find the tiny proportion of important requests amongst all the status changes and other rubbish. Perhaps it's reasonable to expect us to check all the newly-filed bugs, but this particular bug was a feature request which was later changed to a request to enable an extension. It's really the extension developer ThomasV's responsibility to contact the relevant people and see that it gets reviewed and accepted.
Bugzilla is useful as a publically accessible issue tracker. It can be used to describe a problem in detail. This description can then be referenced in direct requests to developers via IRC, email or the mailing list.
I realize that the developers are volunteers and are able to chose what interests them and where they would like to work. But they do not even give any feedback or even tell us they will not help us and we should learn to live without it.
I'm not a volunteer, and neither is Brion. But if you want to contact us, then do so, don't just leave a comment on an obscure bug report, or create a wiki page and expect us to find it.
I should say that even though we are full time employees, we do have our priorities, and we can't implement every feature that passes a user vote. It's great that ThomasV has been doing some development work on Wikisource, that helps a lot, but he has to go that last mile and push for his features to be accepted.
-- Tim Starling