Andre, good points, thanks. I think that this ties in with my comments regarding having a common situational awareness. I don't think that I have good situational awareness regarding the state of the backlog, the composition of the backlog, etc. I'm confident that there is a backlog and that there are tasks in that backlog which I would like to see solved, but it's difficult to get a sense of the big picture.
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 9:13 PM Andre Klapper aklapper@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, 2019-03-12 at 20:34 +0000, Pine W wrote:
- My impression is that there's agreement that there is a huge backlog.
Phabricator is public. Anyone can propose and report anything. Hence the number of ideas, bugs, feature requests is usually higher than the number of available developers (paid or not) needed to work on them. Hence the number of tasks which will remain unresolved grows. Because in theory someone could always show up and provide a patch.
If you know a larger free and open source software project where the number of resolved (not: declined) tickets per month/year/etc is higher than the number of open(ed) tickets, I'd be curious to know.
- I think that there's consensus that the backlog is a problem.
No, why?
There are likely quite some ideas that don't make much sense to prioritize and fix (out of project scope, time consuming because of required huge architecture changes, increased test complexity and maintenance costs after adding yet another preference, etc etc).
And many ideas and bugs that will not get fixed (limited number of available developers, different individual and group priorities) until you (or someone else) writes code if you're really interested in seeing that fixed. (If that idea is considered 'in scope' - see above.)
And disappointment *if* someone makes a decision to decline a request. And followup discussion to challenge someone's decision which takes time that could have been spent to work on tasks that someone considers more important. In practice, people and time are limited resources.
andre
Andre Klapper | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
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