Scott Bussinger wrote:
>> Christian has made a very useful report on the popular tickets:
>> http://trac.edgewall.org/report/32
>>
>
> This _is_ an interesting report. To make it truly useful though I
> think would require two things:
>
> 1) Explicitly stating that development on the project is going to be
> at least partially guided by the number of people who "vote" for a
> feature request by entering themselves in the CC field.
>
Well, using the CC count as a way to measure the popularity of a ticket
is only a kind of a hack... There are many biases to this approach. For
example, one thing that I have witnessed several times is that when
there's some renewed activity on a long-standing ticket where many
people are on CC, the next thing you will observe is that a lot of
people will *remove* themselves from the list. That can be interpreted
in many ways, but most probably those people have either found a
workaround within Trac, or a Trac replacement in the meantime. So while
the subscribing is indicative of interest, the unsubscribing could be
taken as a "dissatisfaction" indicator.
But nevertheless, that report gives an idea about what some users want
(or wanted) over time.
> 2) A definite show of support from the active developers on the
> project to actually implement some of the popular features requested
> (either in the core or as a supported plugin).
>
That does happen, I should make another report, similar to {32} but for
what has already been accomplished.
Here it is: http://trac.edgewall.org/report/33
Now the problem is to find those active developers ... the solution
being, become an active developer yourself!
> But I'm not going to waste my time with all that if I don't think it's
> going to affect what gets worked on. Look at that report -- the top
> several items are all 4 years old. While I love Trac and I really
> appreciate all that the development team has done and is doing, the
> Trac project does not have a reputation in the community at large for
> being fast and responsive to requests.
>
Well, lobbying is one thing, getting effectively involved is another,
and more effective in the long run. There are many ways to help the
project, Jani mentioned setting up a documentation team, Jeroen is
motivating people around the world to contribute translations, etc.
Before making the more ambitious changes that usually correspond to
long-standing issues, it is possible for anyone to start getting more
involved by tackling any problem of intermediate size, from trivial to
complex. The contribution can be anything, from testing a proposed fix
(there are /many/ problems nearly fixed, just awaiting feedback),
investigating strange configuration problems to shed some light on not
fully understood issues (e.g. #3663 of today), help to tweak the CSS or
the presentation of templates (e.g. #7075 of today), and so on.
Also, after the 0.11 release I've "reset the counters" on component
ownership, new tickets are no longer assigned to someone automatically (*).
That automatic assignment gave a false sense of confidence that the
ticket would actually be screened or managed by someone. We should
better face the reality that there are not really that many active core
developers around...
So starting from this reset we can either have new people engaging
themselves to monitor specific components of Trac, or leave the owner
unset and set the ownership in an ad-hoc way using the "assign to"
action. I'd even suggest that anyone (i.e. even when not formally part
of the TracTeam) could take ownership of a ticket, indicating by this
that he commits himself into resolving the ticket. I think that could
help stimulate newcomers to get more involved in the project.
We could even take this reset one step further by clearing that field
for all the existing opened tickets, not just the newer ones.
-- Christian
(*) usually that "someone" was me - but as said elsewhere, I have my own
idea of the "SeaChange" needed. Also, if any former component owner
thinks he should remain set as the owner, just put your name back, of
course.
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