[wp-hackers] The problem with Contributions and This Thread

[Andrew Nacin]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 8:28 PM, Jacob Santos <wordpress at santosj.name>
 wrote:

> You can not say this is a community driven project and then completely
> ignore the community aspect of the phrase. Is the project 5% community
> driven, 10%, 20% or more? I also see contradictions and logical
> inconsistencies in several of the statements and direction of the WordPress
> development. I went over the WordPress Decision presentation by Jane Wells
> at Portland and when you have a hierarchy where the contributors of patches
> are so far down as to be irrelevant, then yes, you do have a corporate
> process. One of the examples itself was one of a company and I quote, "You
> can't walk into a Microsoft meeting and expect to be heard." Well, the
> quote
> is not verbatim.



If the statement, "Well, join another community or project." Then the
> statement should be clarified to mean, "Join a project that actually cares
> about its contributors and gives feedback on patches in a timely manner."
> This statement should NEVER be uttered by an official of the project and
> the
> fact that you and others continue to defend and repeat the statement may
> continue the downward trend of fewer contributors. If the desire is to have
> mainly leads developing WordPress, then I believe you are moving in the
> right path.


Jacob,

Don't tell Jane to not take it personally when you go ahead and base an
entire thread on the state of your particular patches and then attempt to
frame our entire development process through that light. It's crap and it's
in complete disregard to what's really happening.

This thread is based on the fact that a half-dozen minor HTTP patches you
submitted never got reviewed by the component owner. I get that, but there
are also hundreds of other patches that required (and received) review, too.
Most of them are higher priority and address serious bugs or are dealing
with feature development. Yours did not.

You're never around, and you've already said you have no plans to continue
to participate. And yet, here we are. I'm not sure why.  If you want to keep
taking shots in the dark at what amount of this project is community-driven,
I'll provide you some real numbers. So allow me to share with the list some
stats on meritocracy and community:

WordPress 3.1 has had 1741 individual commits with 175 different
contributors. A shorter cycle accounts for the smaller numbers overall, but
the ratio is up from 3.0, which is fantastic. One third of those commits
were mine. Of those, I authored about half, and the other 280 commits were
patches by others that I reviewed.

There are a number of trusted contributors who provide strong code for
various components. Here's a list of the top contributors for 3.1. It can
double as an incomplete list of trusted
contributors: nacin, scribu, ryan, westi, PeteMall, filosofo, duck_,
dd32, ocean90, MarkJaquith, koopersmith.

Not coincidentally, these and other contributors are highly valued for the
project, and spend a great deal of time triaging and fixing bugs,
collaborating with each other, reviewing patches by others, participating in
dev chats and bug scrubs (these have happened almost daily all month), and
lead the direction of specific features and the project as a whole. They are
often involved on a daily basis. Anyone can become one of these
contributors. You just need to contribute.

I've earned the right to make decisions. I don't think you've earned the
right to sling mud.

Regards,
Nacin