---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Birgitte SB birgitte_sb@yahoo.com Date: 23-Sep-2006 16:38 Subject: [Foundation-l] Does anyone else think bugzilla is a complete failure To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@wikimedia.org
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.
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Vote_on_enabling_the_ProtectSection_ex...
This was back in January. Nothing ever happened. The underlying problem this feature would solve will now hopefully be able to be addressed by "Stable version". At least I hope "stable versions" will be workable. But the last email about how de.WP wants a much more complicated system for this worries me.
There are other technical issues that have projects on WS at a standstill.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5881
I ask people online. Bugs are filed. Nothing happens. I do not want to make the effort to get all sub-domains to show support for these new features when it will have no effect. 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. We just wait month upon month hoping it is on someone's to-do list somewhere. It is beyond frustrating. Has anyone else experienced these problems?
Birgitte SB
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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
On 9/24/06, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
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.
It would be great if there were a centralized "prioritising" system. Obviously not everything can get implented. Also, developers will tend towards implementing what interests them personally. However, if/when they can implement some arbitrary feature, it would be nice if it was the most requested one...
Steve
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It would be great if there were a centralized "prioritising" system. Obviously not everything can get implented. Also, developers will tend towards implementing what interests them personally. However, if/when they can implement some arbitrary feature, it would be nice if it was the most requested one...
There is a "voting" feature on bugzilla that does seem to be getting used somewhat. If you look at the bottom of a bug, you'll see a link to "Vote for this bug". The current highest bug by votes (108) is "Single login on all wikimedia projects" which is definitely getting worked on. You can see the full list by going to the Advanced Search, and look inside "Email and Numbering" for "Only bugs with at least: __ votes". Enter a number such as "10", then on the results page, click on "Votes" to see them arranged highest to lowest.
- -- Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200609241703 http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
This is a problem with any predominantly volunteer coding project: people do what they want to do, based on what they think is important. (Tim and Brion aren't volunteers, but then, they usually still decide what to do by themselves.) Look at the amount of angst happening in something like Mozilla's https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45375, say, with 306 votes. Developers haven't stopped by to do much of anything except deny version-blocking requests.
No, people are not going to tell you when they aren't interested: if they aren't interested, they *won't* tell you anything, which is how you can tell. If they're interested, they'll comment and assign the bug to themselves. It would be rather pointless to have a horde of developers say that they're not interested, on almost every single newly-submitted bug (of which there are what, ten to thirty a day, with something like five or ten active developers?).
Bugzilla has nothing to do with the issue either way. The issue is that there's limited manpower, and it's not necessarily assigned based on what the community wants, as some would like.
On 9/23/06, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Perhaps it's reasonable to expect us to check all the newly-filed bugs,
Or maybe to occasionally glance over standing bugs with patches attached, and submit if they're not too complicated to quickly and easily test. Or to look at some of the bugs with relatively many votes from time to time and implement any that would be relatively easy. Or something. Looking at new bugs might not be the best solution, since those are as often unimportant as old bugs.
This description can then be referenced in direct requests to developers via IRC, email or the mailing list.
Which only work because of lower load, needless to say. If more and more people start using those methods, they'll start to get tuned out as well. There's merit to saying that developers should assign no weight to personal requests made on IRC or similar media, but rather make their own evaluation of the worthiness of standing issues, looking at them organized by things like vote number and whether patches are provided so as not to have to look at the masses of dubious or niche requests. This focuses effort to fulfill feature requests along more productive lines than giving it to those who happen to go on IRC rather than Bugzilla.
But of course, all that is up to each dev to choose. Because MediaWiki is (almost entirely) a volunteer project.
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.
Doing so would require one person to speak for all developers. It is probably a much better idea for you to lower your expectations. If you don't hear anything, chances are very high it is not on anyone's to-do list at all. If you learn to live without it and then someone implements it two years later, it's a positive surprise for you, which is surely better than two years of constant frustration :)
Timwi
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