Nick,
Bob answered most of the questions with facts but I wanted to provide more
detail/insight to what he offered.
1. The assignment agreement requirement is a pain. It's a pain on many fronts.
a. In your particular case, if you were one of the few that tried to get an
assignment agreement early this year then you probably hit the case where Dawn
was on vacation and there was a temp in place who didn't quite get through all
the work that Dawn manages. The electronic assignment agreement system also
had some kinks that got worked out in February or March. The process *seems*
to be working now and any agreement that is filed gets an email response
notifying the signer that all is in place.
b. Having to sign an assignment agreement to *give* code away is just headache
for any would-be contributor. I know this and every opportunity I get I
request that the assignment agreement be reconsidered. The new electronic
process is far better than the "print out this form and mail it back to this
address" previously but nothing would be better. Don't hold your breath.
c. The assignment agreement adds overhead for me on a project that is already
"overhead" by some people's terms. However, I now have a tool available that
makes it easier for me to look up who has signed assignment agreements (before
I usually had to email Dawn to get the list) but it is often difficult to match
that data there with the user names on SourceForge. It all takes time.
d. The assignment agreement exists for reasons that have absolutely nothing to
do with what we are trying to do here. That just bugs the ever living
daylights out of me.
e. Finally, if I screw up on an assignment agreement process, I have a very
good chance of undoing all the work we've done to get the WiX toolset released
as Open Source and probably damage other projects inside Microsoft that have or
are trying to follow what the WiX toolset has done. This (like e above) has
less to do with the WiX toolset and more to do with Microsoft (and that bugs me
too).
2. I only get so far through the "administrivia" each week. A nasty thing has
started happening since my email volume has taken off. I've ended up with
"blocks" of email that I never see until I go through some processing later
(usually every few months). I'm trying to find ways to keep up but I'm not
sure what to do with the 325 unanswered emails in my Inbox (built up over the
last month) and the 1383 unread emails related to WiX (built up over 6 months).
Frederik (who has contributed significant amounts of code) actually fell back
to IM'ing me to get status of changes. Gabor (who has lead the localization
efforts) just emails me directly multiple times.
3. Attaching to the bug is usually a great way to get the code noticed. The
recent problem is that I've been primarily focused on WiX v2 bugs to reach
escrow. That means many WiX v3 bugs haven't been looked at thoroughly.
Anyway, the bottom line is: I've flagged your message and will be sure to
check out bug 1715298 tomorrow night (my weekly time to focus on WiX coding
tasks). I'm sorry for any grief you've experienced along the way and your
feedback on the current state of things is much appreciated.
PS: Marc Andreessen (yes, that Andreessen) posted a blog entry today
(http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-3.html) that, IMHO, captured a
very real snapshot of how a "very large company" feels *from the outside* of a
very large company. Fascinating read in any case (might provide a bit of
context for issues listed in #1 above). Actually, the whole blog has been
quite interesting (only up for a few weeks).
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Neil Sleightholm
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2007 3:04 PM
To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [WiX-users] How do I submit code? Do you want my changes?
Apologies but this is a bit of rant...
I have tried to submit code changes to WiX but no one seems to respond. Here is
what I have done:
- Applied for a "assignment agreement", heard nothing...
- Applied for a "assignment agreement", heard nothing...
- Applied for a "assignment agreement", heard from Microsoft asking me to
help with a new system. I helped, submitted the "assignment agreement", heard
nothing...
- Ok I thought, you guys have better things to do than paperwork, so I
worked on a code change to fix a bug in the NAnt task. I submitted a bug
(1715295) and followed the advice given here to email the devs list. I did this
on 9 May 07 so I don't think I am being impatient but you guessed it, heard
nothing...
- Not one to give up I tried again. This time I submitted a bug (1715298)
with the code to fix it. Again, heard nothing...
So what do I have to do to get code accepted?
WiX has made making installs much simpler for me and I have 2 clients using it
on my recommendation. I would really like to contribute to the code but don't
want to spend the time doing it if there is no way of getting the code accepted
(or rejected).
Regards,
Neil
Neil Sleightholm
X2 Systems Limited
[EMAIL PROTECTED]<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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