Am 03.08.2004 um 21:01 schrieb Chris Muller:

>
> May I agitate this thread with intentions of good?
>
> In my personal experience, the actual submission of changes/fixes has 
> been
> difficult and laborious.  After the actual submission, some of them 
> further
> required continued hard lobbying/nagging/reminding, etc.  Even after 
> hours of
> work, many never made it.
>
Yes, that happens. There are right now 400 not-yet dealed with 
submissions
in BFAV. And there are only an handful of people actualy looking at 
that stuff.
People always think that their stuff should be added, but they in turn 
do not
look at anything that others submit. They just don't care.

So in the end there are lots of people submitting stuff, and only 2-3 
looking at
the changesets.

> With such a high "cost" of getting a change, it really emphasizes what 
> Lex
> seems to be complaining about..  That the process does not support 
> small,
> simple, safe fixes.  What if someone merely wants to correct a class 
> or method
> comment?  There's no way that's worth going through the pain of the 
> current
> process, not only for the submitter but for the harvester, and that's 
> a shame
> because lots of "baby-step" improvements can contribute a lot to the 
> maturity
> of a system.
>
All comment-only changes have been approved *very* fast over the last 6 
Month.
I don't think you will find any submission of that kind that didn't 
make it in the next
round of updated after it was submitted.

(One problem we have is that it takes much too long to get the approved 
stuff in the
update stream).

> What if we used an approach where, say, during the alpha phase, the 
> community
> *as a whole* had an opportunity to make and eat its own dog food.
>
>   - anyone can submit a change/fix that will make it to a 
> publicly-accessible
> update repository ("the update stream?")
>   - anyone can bring in these current public changes from others a la 
> "update"
> mode, i.e., they can see the change before they import it.  Also, 
> people will
> learn to save their image first..  :)
>   - We use a tool (BFAV?) that allows people to comment and possibly 
> even
> "vote" on each particular change.
>   - The same tool could be used to improve a particular change based 
> on others
> comments, of course.
>
>


To judge from the current process: People are not interested in 
commenting on
other changes. I am happy to if I get a *single* comment on a changset. 
And
I don't see how this is fundamentally differnt from BFAV: We already 
have a stream
of enhancements and a tool to view/load and vote on them. But nobody 
cares.

I think one thing to try would be to make it possible to commit 
"trusted" developers
more directly and faster... but I have not yet a good idea of how that 
could work.

     Marcus