On Mon, 2006-09-11 at 17:23 -0700, SmileyChris wrote: > I greatly appreciate the hard work of the current committers, but I am > starting to wonder if there are too few of them to handle the number of > tickets being entered into Trac. > > Closed tickets with resolution of fixed: 1382 (invalid, wontfix, > duplicate or worksforme: 699) > Open tickets: 501 > Open tickets with Adrian as the owner: 419
Raw statistics like this can be misleading and I think they are in this case. Yes, it's slightly disappointing to see the number creep up from month to month, but it's not a tragedy. Django still works, it's still usable in serious applications. We're getting an expanded user base and so more reports from the fringe cases are coming in (for example). We're getting more feature requests now than 10 months ago, for example. Since about half the tickets filed that have been closed are not actually requiring fixes, it's not crazy to think that the average carries across in part to the the currently open tickets as well. Probably not precisely, since many obviously bad tickets can be closed as invalid or wontfix pretty quickly, but there will be some currently open tickets that are ultimately going to be "wontfix"-ed or marked as invalid or closed en masse as part of some fix. Secondly, "open" covers a lot of items: actual bugs, feature requests (of which there are a very large number), tickets that are basically different reports of the same problem -- but in slightly different ways. If we see obvious duplicates, they are marked as such, but sometimes the dupe is not obvious, or both tickets contain very useful information or different approaches and so they are temporarily left open. I'm personally pretty guilty of leaving a few tickets open that aren't even assigned to me because I know they'll all be fixed as part of some ongoing work I'm doing (this email and some time I now have will prompt me to fix that; thanks). Others (Russel, Adrian, Jacob, Luke, James, ...) might operate the same way. Thirdly, the "Adrian as owner" measure is really bogus. The bulk of components have Adrian as the owner. I've mentioned in the past that I wouldn't mind if we had a generic user as the default owner to avoid that misperception, but it's hardly a real problem once you're aware of it. Look for tickets were Adrian has accepted the assignment (the ones with (*) next to them in reports) -- that is a better measure. If I'm doing a run through the tickets looking for low hanging fruit or items of itnerest or antiquity, I tend to ignore whoever has their name next to it unless it has (a) been accepted, or (b) changed recently, indicating that somebody has shown recent interest. Unsurprisingly, I haven't yet had anybody get annoyed that I fixed a bug they were really dying to work on. Everybody is obviously pragmatic about preferring fixes over glory. My intuition is that right at the moment we are falling behind slightly because a few of us have been distracted with other things (you know, paying jobs, etc). However, we had a few good months prior to that and I think you'll see things swing up again over the next little while (law of averages, mostly). There has been a noticable uptick in various people trying to triage bugs, which helps -- detecting obvious dupes, closing some things as wontfix or invalid based on experience and knowledge of history. I should pull out some of the GNOME and Fedora bug triaging guidelines and tailor them to Django's work practices so that more people can start helping out there. A "bug squad" of triagers never hurts. Finally, a particularly important consideration is "what is the alternative to what we are doing currently?" I have worked on a bunch of Open Source projects with much larger numbers of open tickets than Django (although they were also broader in scope) and the same questions come up there. My own personal experience is that I still can't always read Adrian and Jacobs' minds about how they want to do things. Sometimes it's because good people choose different approaches, sometimes it's because I'm completely insane, sometimes it's because I don't agree with their approach (but can still live with whatever the resolution is). Now imagine there are another two dozen people with similar good intentions and no telepathy. The pressure ratchets up on the maintainers. Arbitrarily increasing committers isn't a silver bullet, even if extremely well intentioned. Increasing, for want of a better word, second level support -- the group who help skim off the low-hanging fruit and turn real reports into patches, etc -- is not a bad aim, though. I don't think you're question is out of line, but my experience says that things aren't as bad as they may seem if you only look at the Django universe. That doesn't excuse us from continuing to work hard, but it's not panic stations by any means. Regards, Malcolm --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
