Erik Huelsmann wrote:
> On 12/7/05, Gale, David <David.Gale@hypertherm.com> wrote:
> I'm sorry for my childish reaction, but it's exactly the harping on
> "it's a bug" which triggered it. I already admitted that it's not an
> ideal situation. Also, the team has already acknowledged that this is
> not the final state of things. Past discussions on the dev@ list and
> issues recording those discussions are artefacts of it.
Not everyone reads the dev@ list. I know I don't.
>> Neither of Gary's posts have indicated that he is a programmer, or
>> that he can spend several hours a night (thank you for your
>> willingness to do that,
>> by the way) working on fixing this behavior. Sniping at him like
>> this
>> is extremely unprofessional.
>
> In OSS, people scratch their own itches, if this is his itch, he
> should see to it that it gets scratched. Not by reiterating "it should
> be fixed" but by taking apropriate action. Others have talked about
> hiring capacity to develop higly wanted features, if he's not a coder,
> why not do the same?
Perhaps because he doesn't have the money to hire someone, either? I
know that I, personally, wouldn't be able to afford it (unless someone
is willing to take it on for the cost of a pizza & a pack of beer, which
would surprise me). I'm a relatively recent college grad who's already
gone through two layoffs, and have a variety of debts demanding that
they get paid. Even if I really wanted a particular feature
implemented/bug fixed, I simply don't have the resources to fund the
effort to resolve it.
>> Better would be to be to point out Issue 898, "implement true
>> renames",
>> which (if fixed) would actually change the current behavior to match
>> what has been asked for in this thread. Since Issue 898 is
>> classified
>> as a "DEFECT" rather than an "ENHANCEMENT" or "FEATURE", it would
>> appear
>> that the dev. community agrees that this is, in fact, a bug. Also,
>> there are (currently) 50 votes for this issue--the second highest
>> issue
>> by votes in the Issue Tracker, making it fairly clear that the user
>> community also feels fairly strongly that this is a major issue.
>
> That being noted, I must say that I don't know of any developer who
> uses votes to direct development attention.
Which is disappointing, and frustrating. I mean, I understand that
developers (especially in OSS) work on what's interesting to them, and
what they feel qualified to tackle; however, I would hope that at least
the full-time Collab.net Subversion developers would pay attention to
the vote system. As I've pointed out before, that's one of the primary
ways the subversion community has to communicate our priorities to the
dev team--we're discouraged from posting to the dev@ list, and
complaining that there's a bug that needs fixing on users@ leads to this
sort of discussion. What tool would you suggest we use to encourage the
dev team to work on specific issues?
>> Of
>> course, reading through the comments for 898 make it clear that
>> fixing
>> this will be a fairly involved process.
>
> That's exactly the problem. This is *really* hard to get right. You've
> come to expect from us to build our software conforming to very high
> quality standards. This one takes a lot of effort to do right the
> first time, because there are several edge cases in the versioned
> backend alone, making only some members of the dev team fit to the
> task...
That being the case, I'm even more concerned about your "fix it"
response. If only a portion of the dev team, who are familiar with the
code base, have the knowledge & skills needed to fix this issue, then
suggesting that someone outside of the dev team--with no known
programming skills or familiarity with the code base--should tackle the
problem seems the worst possible response. At best, you'd get a patch
which could very possibly break a large part of the code inadvertently,
leaving the dev team to either ignore the patch or spend more time
evaluating & adjusting it than it would take to code the fix in the
first place.
Again, I have to ask--if only a portion of the dev team can address this
issue, how can we, as a community of users, request those developers to
address it? We want subversion to be the best VC tool out there, even
if we don't have the resources to make it so ourselves.
-David
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Received on Thu Dec 8 14:10:58 2005