communication

| David Dawes  [email protected] 
| On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 03:52:14PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
|>On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 07:08:52PM +0000, Alan Hourihane wrote: 
|>> So RedHat paying someone to be interested/able to write the code might
|>> be useful ?
|>> >
|>Sure it would be useful. (And we do pay a large number of open source
|>developers.) However, this can't be the answer to everything that
|>needs doing, or even most things.
|>>FWIW, XFree86 is the only project I've noticed where developers
|>frequently make this suggestion; "why doesn't someone fund bugzilla,"
|>"we can't do such-and-such unless someone pays us" - I won't try to
|>speculate on why or what it means.
|It could be because we as volunteers keep getting people (and
|companies) telling us what we should do.  Actually, "pressuring"
|would be more accurate.  Since you mention the bugzilla example,
|by far the largest pressure for that came from the likes of Red
|Hat, not from the developers who will have to use it.

Hi,

	Like a lot of people I think I firmly intended to lurk on the 
list avoiding flames and other inconveniences (and letting well-known 
and respected people like Alan Cox and Havoc Pennington clean the mess)
but clearly they are not taken at their word and some low-level grunt 
noise is needed.

	I happen to have submitted a patch to XFree86 recently (which 
was taken in BTW). I didn't code the patch - just cleaned it up. The 
original author never submitted it because he didn't know who was the 
maintainer of this part of XFRee86 and he'd had wished to discuss it 
before submitting. Red Had didn't want to submit it because they had their 
hands full getting their own patches accepted (and were generally a 
bit disgusted by the process). Lots of people just said - well this is 
interesting, it should go in, *we* won't submit it, do it yourself and
btw we wish you luck (for a trivial non-invasive patch that existed for 
years in the wild).

	I'd never have done it without the availability of the web cvs
interface (which I understand is quite new). I'd have killed to have a 
proper bugzilla at the time with someone in charge at the other end of the
issue. Fact is, if the patch hadn't been taken in in two weeks time I'd 
have given-up on XFree86 and its black-hole lists like everyone else.
I don't mind projects having too few ressources to react immediately.
What I do mind is having to submit without any ack or feedback for months 
without knowing if it's acted upon.

	So because people happen to work for well-known companies do not
assume they only speak for those companies. Quite often they also speak for
lots of people like me that don't dare bothering the PTB with their daily 
concerns.

	Public perception of XFree86 might be well of actual XFRee86 processes,
but certainly shunning all the usual tools projects use to communicate with
occasional contributors didn't help a single bit.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

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