Rob
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my little rant J and for
adding my code change to the release (hopefully I will have more for you
soon).
Neil
From: Rob Mensching [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 28 June 2007 07:53
To: Neil Sleightholm; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: RE: How do I submit code? Do you want my changes?
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).
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