[wp-hackers] Re: Unanswered tickets

[Jacob]

spencerp wrote:
> Stephen Rider wrote:
>> I think resolving it is the point.  If it's such a slam dunk, why is 
>> it still in Trac?  (Okay, I see that it was just resolved _today_ 
>> which kind of makes the point of having drawn attention to it.)
> Exactly. And if I remember correctly... someone, I think it was 
> Ryan... asked people on here what they thought should be "high 
> priority" tickets or tickets that people would like to see get more 
> attention... And what better to knock out first, than the simpler 
> tickets... Especially with an Admin redesign coming soon, you can only 
> touch so much tickets without interfering with it.. I know I pointed 
> out SOME tickets that were pending on the Admin redesign... but they 
> were also planned for 2.4 though, as well as the Admin redesign stuff...
>
>> At the least, things should be marked "Ain't gonna", "Obsolete", 
>> "Waiting for TinyMCE update", or whatever.  Right now many of them 
>> are "Waiting for Godot" -- hanging in limbo -- which gives the people 
>> volunteering their efforts the impression that they're efforts are 
>> ignored, which is not good for the future of WordPress.
>>
>> I've had a particular patch in for months now.  It would be nice to 
>> see _some_ indication of whether anybody is even considering it.  
>> Obviously it's not all going to be decided a day after submission, 
>> but six months later there ought to be _something_.
>>
>> I do not mean to insult any of the "higher ups" at WordPress.  
>> Obviously there are a _ton_ of bugs submitted, and a lot of patches, 
>> and it's a lot to slog through.  But when somebody takes the time to 
>> write a patch, somebody, somewhere, should give some feedback -- yes, 
>> this might be used/no it's crap/it needs work/whatever.
> I agree with this as well. I was going to say more, but I have to 
> leave for work. Hopefully things workout here soon. There's so much 
> backlog of tickets in Trac now that it's not funny...sigh. Aight.. I'm 
> off for work..

Sorry for the late introduction into this discussion, but I feel 
somewhat differently about tickets. I agree with you, with more than one 
point, my personal opinion on tickets is that you have to show each one 
some love. However, the main problem is that I feel that the reporter 
should show the ticket love too. You can't just give birth to this 
ticket and wander off. If the details aren't clear enough then the specs 
will never be sorted out and the ticket isn't worth taking the time to 
write for. I do agree that if you don't know better than it probably 
isn't a good idea to close a ticket out. I've left tickets open that I 
thought should be closed because I didn't feel it was within my right 
and expertise to know whether the ticket should be closed.

At least that is how I would feel if I had my own open source project, 
but I'm pretty sure that with 500+ tickets, limited time, and various 
degrees of I-really-don't-care-for-that-ticket that project might fall 
into the same state.

I don't particularly agree with your assertion that the more complex 
tickets should be committed before the simple ones. You can most likely 
knock out 10 simple tickets in the time it would take to write and argue 
the points for a more complex one. Take the cookie authentication 
change. It took weeks to finish that and it is still open for 
opinion/discussion, which I think is a good thing. I think security is 
extremely important, but you can't hold back everything.

Eh, I've written a couple of patches (#4779 for example, few others 
probably) that may never see the light of day. At least not without a 
lot of debate (which hasn't started yet). For those that haven't had 
their patches committed, then I suppose you really need to explain why 
your patches should be committed. That is basically had I did it. I 
suppose and bitching a lot, it helps sometimes to bitch about tickets.

Open source in general, developers show love towards a problem that woos 
them. I mean, sometimes that love doesn't last and the developer finds a 
new ticket that looks prettier. I know that out of your list, I'll never 
touch the comments nor admin sections nor the i18n tickets. They just 
aren't sexy enough.

So I mean, I've gained a lot of respect for a lot of people this past 
week and good job all you damn sexy testers/ticket reviewers/devs!

-- 

Jacob Santos

http://www.santosj.name - blog
http://wordpress.svn.dragonu.net/unittest/ - unofficial WP unit test suite.

Also known as darkdragon and santosj on WP trac.