On 07/11/13 16:28, Quim Gil wrote:
The issue is the extra step for newcomers vs the risk
of many extra
steps for a few etablished contributors if someone decides to abuse the
feature, as it happened in the past. And my point is that I personally
don't believe that such barrier is diminishing the volume of actual
contributions we receive.
In order to get somewhere with this discussion, it would be useful to
know the current practice of other free software projects, using
Bugzilla or not. As a newcomer, can I assign bugs to myself in GNOME,
KDE, Ubuntu, Debian... etc?
Would that be useful, though? Generally what other free software
projects do is what works for them, and it won't necessarily work for
us. It is also most especially not necessarily good practice when it
comes to actually attracting and keeping new folks, simply due to the
nature of what free software often entails - somewhere along the line,
there is usually a lack of resources, and it is newcomers who suffer the
most.
As much as projects would like, and for that matter, need, new folks,
they only have so much time to devote to it and especially when
volunteers make up a bulk of the community people wind up spending most
time on other things. Bugzilla lacks certain key features that would
make it feasible to open up from the start, and my guess would be it has
something to do with similar - it was simply not a priority, so it never
happened.
For a rather extreme example, there was another project, some OS thing,
that a friend of mine wanted to contribute to awhile back, but he found
that they had disabled account creation entirely due to lack of
resources to combat spam, requiring instead that you find them on IRC or
some such and contact them that way for an account. In no way is this
good practice, and has very much harmed them as well, and yet it was
probably the best thing they could do with what they had.
Just please be careful when looking at what other people do, here. Why
they did something can be far more important than what they actually did.