On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 5:33 PM, rupert THURNER rupert.thurner@gmail.com wrote:

i'd really appreciate some love towards other projects here, and get things fixed at source as well, in mid term (i.e months, one or two years).

Lots of people are working on lots of different projects. What's your point? Or am I missing some implication that you were referring to a particular project?

hi faidon, i do not think you personally and WMF are particularly helpful in accepting contributions. because you:

• do not communicate openly the problems
• do not report upstream publically
• do not ask for help, and even if it gets offered you just ignore it

with quite some arrogance

I have some first hand experience with contributing to various WMF git repos and I've observed the way people respond to new contributors. I don't think your points are accurate in general. (but neither is the process perfect every time.)

OTOH, you can send patches/edits to documentation/processes for integrating work from new contributors. I will commit to reviewing the first few of your proposed changes if they are truly constructive and you send me links to them within a reasonable amount of time from now.

Clipping out the part about gitblit and forking that to another thread.

On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 12:47 PM, Faidon Liambotis faidon@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Is dedicating (finite) engineering time to write the necessary code for e.g. gdnsd to support DNSSEC, just to be able to support DANE for which there's exactly ZERO browser support, while at the same time breaking a significant chunk of users, a sensible thing to do?

i don't mean this to sound rude, but you give me the impression that you handle the https and dns case similarly than the gitblit case. you tried some approaches, and let me perceive you think only in your wmf box.

I think I may understand what "paying half the rent" was supposed to mean earlier. (even if I don't think it was applicable to gitblit. As I said above, forked irrelevant discussion about gitblit performance to another thread)

But, I don't understand how that could possibly apply at all to what you quoted above. Faidon's statements about DANE and development time and prioritizing seem sensible to me. (at least on first reading and given the caveat that I haven't read about DANE yet) In particular I don't see any indication that something was attempted and then people gave up. (note: giving up is sometimes justified too!)

There are some realities we have to live with even if we don't like them and those may effect how we prioritize some work. e.g. we can't choose which browser people use to access our projects and we can't stop them from using a 6 year old OS. (and we can't choose which ISP or country they access the projects from!) What we *can* do is measure how many people use which browsers and versions, ISPs, etc. and get statistics on how many people will be effected (positively or negatively) by a given change. (and maybe that's not always perfect but at least it can help)

So, at what point do we decide that not enough people are effected for us to devote time to something? if it only effects people running * an alpha browser build released yesterday? * a nightly automated browser build? * a browser built with a patch applied that's not even in trunk/master yet?

I don't know and I'm happy I usually don't have to get involved with those decisions. And of course sometimes we have advanced warning that a change currently in an alpha or beta will be included in a build that will soon be widely released.

OTOH, not everything any engineer does is dictated by those questions; some things are fixed or improved just because a particular engineer cared about it. And I think that's good too. (also, patches welcome! you don't have to be anyone special to be that person that cared a little extra about a feature)

-Jeremy