Hey,

I am rather unhappy that the volunteer nature of the work keeps being
brought up as a reply to the release process not being good. Yes, you
cannot reasonably demand that a volunteer invests more of their time, or
that they spend it in a certain way. The issue here is a poor release
process, which in my view is quite orthogonal.

There are also many stakeholders beyond James that are affected, and they
are not irrelevant. Most noticeably the users of the software, which are
not getting access to long developed features. There are also the other
people that contribute to the software. Speaking for myself, I am not
enthusiastic at all to contribute to a project if it is not clear my
improvements will see the light of day in a reasonable time frame, and
things I previously contributed have been sitting in the dark for over a
year. Such a situation is also not appealing to potential contributors.

Some time ago I started work on adding visual editing to the Maps
extension, to be released as version 6.0. At some point I ran out of time
having gotten only part of the way there. As there was already useful
functionality added, I decided to just release that rather than potentially
keeping it unavailable for months. So the users win. And contributors to
Maps know that their contributions are likely to be released within a week
or two.

The same could have been done for SMW 3.0 long ago. Instead, new features
have kept being added to the milestone.

Now if James does not want to spend time on doing a release that is his
decision. Should it also be his decision to block any release form
happening because he is the primary contributor, even if that throws all
other stakeholders under the buss? I don't think so. And yes, that is what
is happening. I have offered spending time on doing a 3.0 release in the
past, always getting a "you can't do this and don't rush me" type of reply.

Cheers

--
Jeroen De Dauw | https://entropywins.wtf | https://keybase.io/jeroendedauw
Software Crafter | Speaker | Student | Strategist | Contributor to Wikimedia
and Open Source
~=[,,_,,]:3
_______________________________________________
Semediawiki-devel mailing list
Semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel

Reply via email to