Olivier, I'm truly sorry you had such a negative experience. This is not
an acceptable situation. We have an inconsistent process, and one which
is a bit heavyweight when our resourcing for it is rather lightweight.
I wish you had found the patience to assume good faith. There is no
reason for accusations that we don't want good developers. Of course we
*want* them. If we are failing to act like it, it wasn't a personal slam
at you.
And, if I may be forgiven for white-knighting, Sumana's job is to needle
the rest of us so we don't forget about concerns like yours and she
generally does it very well. And she did sound an apologetic note into
the email she sent you. So IMO she's not the problem here. Why she
played a game of telephone here is a bit of a mystery to me though --
maybe she just wanted to be sure that *someone* pinged you since it had
been so long. IMO the developer who reviewed your code should have
contacted you directly.
I had a look at the module you wrote. I share some of the same concerns
about scalability, but that's not really the issue.
I have some experience with user-contributed module archives, having
administered some shared community resources for Perl, Python, and so
on. The cultural differences and relative successes were interesting.
The Python people wanted to have a review process, and a GUI interface,
and binary modules precompiled, and so on and so on, and their projects
never really got off the ground. Perl's CPAN started off as a simple FTP
site where almost anyone could upload code. Guess which one ultimately
succeeded. The point is, IMO there's relatively little payoff for having
*any* review process for modules. Just have a way to report and remove
malware and be done with it. As long as it's clear that the Foundation
doesn't endorse the software there, what is the problem? Maybe we can
also have some kind of badge for "reviewed" or "as seen on Wikipedia"
for the stuff we consider good enough to deploy on big sites.
We already more or less do this -- for instance, there are modules by
GSoC students that are clearly not ready for prime time, and they are
marked accordingly.
On 11/4/11 11:47 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
The long and short of my advice is this: fuck
MediaWiki. If they're
unwilling to accept your contributions, there are a lot of other FOSS
projects that would be happy to have you. Thrilled to have you, even. I'd
strongly encourage finding one. :-)
And why should he listen to you, when you are unwilling to follow your
own advice?
--
Neil Kandalgaonkar |) <neilk(a)wikimedia.org>