François Pinard wrote: > [A.M. Kuchling] > >>On Tue, 6 Dec 2005 00:05:38 -0500, >> François Pinard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >>>It's a relatively recent phenomenon that maintainers go berzerk, foaming >>>at the mouth over forms, borders, colors, and various other mania! :-) > > >>It's largely to ensure that the ideas aren't lost. E-mail sits around >>in an inbox until it gets deliberately deleted or gets lost in a disk >>crash or system upgrade gone wrong. > > > Or sorted properly by the recipient, the way he sees best fit, in the > tracker of his own choice. > > I know I'm repeating myself, but my point just does not seem to get > through. The maintainer should manage his way as a grown up, instead of > expecting the world to learn his ways and manage in his place. > > >>You may suggest that I should process my e-mail more promptly. > > > No, I'm not suggesting you how to work, no more that I would accept that > you force me into working your way. If any of us wants to force the > other to speak through robots, that one is not far from unspeakable... > > >>If the message was important, they'll resend it. > > > This is despising contributions. If someone sends me a message which > I find important, I do take means so that message does not get lost, and > that it will even suvive me for some while. > > >>This is why things need to go into public trackers, or wiki pages. > > > Whatever means the maintainer wants to fill his preservation needs, he > is free to use them. The problem arises when the maintainer wants > imposing his own work methods on others. Let contributors be merely > contributors, and learn how to recognise contributions as such and say > thank you, instead of trying to turn contributors into maintainers. > François, you talk of "the maintainer" as though each piece of code is owned by a single individual. In Python's case this is far from the truth.
So, what you say *seems* to equate to "If there's a problem with Python that I think should be fixed, I should be able to mail the person I suspect is most likely to maintain that code, and they should be obliged to log the bug or enhancement request in the tracking system". There's also a philosophical question here about who is helping who. One might choose to believe that the contributor is assisting the developer, by pointing out a defect in the developer's code. One might alternatively regard the contributor as a supplicant, who needs the assistance of the developer to get a problem fixed. Finally one might regard the contributor (who benefits from having Python available) and the developer (who gets the kudos of having developed something "cool") to be members of a community, prepared to collaborate to achieve something that benefits them both. In the real world people's opinions will have all kinds of other shades as well, of course, but as far as *I'm* concerned, if the developers say "please contribute bug reports through Sourceforge" then I am happy to do so to make sure they don't fall between the cracks and get lost. YMMV. Obviously the developers are in charge here, but I really don't see how putting more load on them by requiring them to collectively be the only sources of bug input to the tracking system will help get more work out of them. If you wanted to build a better tracking system than the one on SourceForge I could certainly support that, but historically there hasn't been much volunteer effort available to switch to something like Roundup which might be preferred. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com PyCon TX 2006 www.python.org/pycon/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
