Brion Vibber wrote:
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.
There are a fair few sorely needed features which won't slow down there
server. For example, a warning when people overwrite images, or the
ability to access the source of protected pages. However, I'm certainly
not doing new features at the moment -- it's been far too long since the
branches were last merged, so I'm working on cleaning up the unstable
branch, not optimisation.
New features do indeed introduce new bugs, but I'd be willing to
tolerate a few new bugs in exchange for a new developer.
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.
Lee's server is still around, although it's a bit broken. The database
schema needs to be updated, for one thing. I seem to remember I either
didn't know how to fix the database, or I didn't have the required
password. Possibly both. Also, the installed software needed updating --
texvc and memcached and all that. I was also put off by a long network
lag. It was all very annoying, so I basically stopped developing until I
had my own test server.
-- Tim Starling.