[Foundation-l] Does anyone else think bugzilla is a complete failure

[George Herbert]

On 9/23/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> --- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 23/09/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > people are becoming frustrated with this.  It
> > seems a
> > > great deal of very minor issues are handled for
> > en.WP
> > > very quickly. They have recently gotten help to
> > > rearrange the side bar display of all things.  Yet
> > > everyone says the developers are overworked.  So I
> > > would think somehow this system of prioritizing
> > what
> > > gets done (bugzilla) must be broken.
> > > Now this is my personal opinion.   I care ten
> > times
> > > more that the development needs of my community
> > are
> > > more fairly  addressed, than that the community's
> > > voices in the Board Elections are not drowned out
> > by
> > > en.WP.
> >
> >
> > It's an Americocentric conspiracy to take over
> > Wikimedia, and
> > absolutely the most effective thing for you to do is
> > Assume Bad Faith!
> > DOWN WITH EN:WP!!
> >
> >
> > No, actually it's probably because a lot of the devs
> > start as editors
> > on en:wp and so that tends to be the project they
> > hang around on and
> > hear the bugs of most. e.g. Rob Church, who has done
> > a *remarkable*
> > amount of recent work on MediaWiki and can be found
> > on en:wp and on
> > #wikipedia ... or Tim Starling, who started as a
> > contributor, realised
> > there was an urgent need for development and
> > sysadmin and pretty much
> > moved to that.
> >
> > That is: if your project doesn't get its favourite
> > bugs fixed, it's
> > not favouritism to en:wp - it's your project not
> > contributing to the
> > development. These are volunteers, if you recall.
> >
> >
> > - d.
>
> Yes I do realize a big part of issue is that the
> people  interested in development are inherently not
> interested in Wikisource.  I was just trying to
> compare this issue with everyone talking about en.WP
> dominating election issues and voting (which everyone
> seemed to classify as a "bad thing")  But seriously to
> everyone who thinks I am just being unrealistic here,
> is nine months to short a time to start complaining?
> Seriously what should my expectations be?
>
>
> Birgitte SB
>
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I think your expectations should be that:

A. Some methods of promoting enhancements to the code are more
effective than others, and that your series of emails here has
hopefully pointed you to some more effective methods.

B. As with many open source projects, there are probably many
enhancements that would be good, or at worst harmless, that do not
happen because nobody who actually does coding ends up highly
interested in the problem.

The ultimate solution to B is to successfully accomplish A.  If you
don't seem to get leverage there, then you may want to learn PHP and
the MediaWiki codebase...  A lot of enhancements ultimately happen
because one person wants it badly enough to code it, even if the
existing community didn't.

MediWiki is no different from any generic open source project in these regards.

The very best, very large development base projects can have a more
user-requirements-request driven approach, but that only works if you
have enough coders / developers that they have "spare time" beyond the
tasks they see as personal individual must-have or individual interest
drivers.  I'm not sure how many people are working on MediaWiki right
now, but it seems relatively small for a very large userbase project.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com