> > Instead of saying "Make X better" you can quantify "Here's how we can make > X better" in a jira and the conversation will continue with interested > parties (opening jiras are free!). Being combative and insulting project on > mailing list may help vent some frustrations but it is counter productive > and makes people defensive.
Yep. In the Cassandra project you'll have a very hard time convincing someone else (under someone elses pay) to work on what you want even if you approach it in the right way. Being assertive/aggressive is sure to remove all chances entirely. OSS for such large projects as Cassandra only works if we have a variety of perspectives all working on the project together, as it's not very feasible for volunteers to get into the C* project on their own time (nor will it ever be). At the moment we don't have enough different perspectives working on the project and the only way to improve that is get involved (preferably writing some code). I have to disagree with people here and point out that just creating JIRA's and (trying to) have discussions about these issues will not lead to change in any reasonable timeframe, because everyone who could do the work has an endless list of bigger fish to fry. I strongly encourage you to get involved and write some code, or pay someone to do it, because to put it bluntly, it's *very* unlikely your JIRA's will get actioned unless you contribute significantly to them yourself. Of course there are also other ways to contribute as well, but by far the most effective would be to contribute fixes, the next most effective would be to contribute documentation and help users on the mailing list. Your Slender Cassandra project is a great example of this, because despite C* being hard to administer, it would give a lot of users examples to work off. If people can get it working properly with the right advice, usability is not such a big issue.
