Hi, 2012/12/9 Anne Wilson: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On 09/12/12 13:50, Frank Reininghaus wrote: >> Hi, >> >> 2012/12/8 Dion Moult: >>> Hello all, >>> >>> On occasion (less actively nowadays) I prune the KDE brainstorm >>> section. For those who don't know, the KDE forums have a section >>> called Brainstorm, where the users can submit ideas and vote on >>> them. >> >> first of all, thanks for your work! I think that the brainstorm >> section of the forums is a very useful tool for the discussion of >> possible new features. >> >>> One of the things I rarely get to do is move submitted ideas into >>> the "In progress" or "Done" sections. This makes me feel that >>> developers simply aren't looking at the Brainstorm and >>> essentially, users are ignored through this medium. >>> >>> As I care very much about the success of the brainstorm and that >>> users actually see that they are being acted upon, and since I >>> have been moderating the section for a long time (I've somewhat >>> become a walking search tool for duplicate ideas!), I want to try >>> and make it work better. >>> >>> Because I cannot force developers to try and integrate it into >>> their workflow if they haven't already, here is my proposal: >>> >>> If you are the lead developer on a certain section of KDE, such >>> as plasma, activites, kontact, etc, please send me an appropriate >>> way to contact you. >> >> I think that unless any maintainer tells you something else, ideas >> from KDE brainstorm that are discussed in the forum and considered >> useful should be reported as wishlist items at bugs.kde.org. >> >>> Every so often, I will pick the users top choices that seem >>> plausible and will bring them to _you_, and discuss how to evolve >>> the idea into something that could be implemented. Then we can >>> open up an enhancement bug report in BKO, and start getting some >>> brainstorm ideas along the Submitted->In progress->Done chain. >> >> Of course it would be nice to see more ideas in the 'Done' >> section. But please note that discussing ideas in the forum and >> then reporting them at bugs.kde.org is by no means a guarantee that >> the idea will really be implemented, even if everyone (including >> the maintainer) agrees that the idea is good. Writing the code, >> testing it and merging it into master usually takes a considerable >> amount of time. If you only have a bit of spare time to work on >> KDE, and your inbox is always packed with mails from bugs.kde.org, >> then you cannot implement many ideas :-( >> > There is a perception that devs don't listen. This is not a > complaint, on my part, but a statement of fact.
just a quick example of what discussing feature requests sometimes looks like from a developer's point of view: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311609 Much of what that person writes is incomprehensible to me, but if I explain in detail why that idea is not going to be implemented by me, and the sentence "Instead, I believe it is just laziness or lack of imagination." appears in the reply, then it's pretty clear to me what he means. This is one of the moments when I not only re-evaluate how much time I'm willing to spend on discussions at bugs.kde.org, but also ask myself for a second why I work on free software at all, rather than spending more time on playing games, reading books, and other things that normal people do. Please note: I know that more than 99.5% of our users are awesome people, and I can understand that they are disappointed if they think that a feature request of theirs does not get the attention that it deserves. I'm just trying to show you that this is only one part of the story, and that discussing feature requests can also involve a huge amount of frustration on the developer side. If I had just ignored the report I quoted above, it would not have caused any harm at all. But then this is another reason why KDE Brainstorm makes so much sense - if the maintainer does not have to deal alone with random ideas from people who have zero knowledge about technical details, then this is certainly an improvement. Best regards Frank >> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<
