Re: [gentoo-dev] ROX: maintainer-wanted and apps out of date

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 13:55 +0200, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> On Monday 12 September 2005 02:25, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > If you're not up for having your code reviewed, don't contribute to an
> > open source project. No-one expects you to produce perfect code
> > straight off (at least, we don't until we give you commit access). We
> > *do* expect you to be prepared to respond to constructive criticism and
> > improve your code.
>
> Personally I think you're just going a bit wild by closing the bug reports as
> wont fix and expecting users to fix them. That's part of developers job, if
> someone takes into account adding an ebuild to the official tree, isn't it?!
> While I can understand your motivation, I'd like to know if your doing is
> backed up by at least an informal decision (didn't follow the threads which
> resulted in the maintainer* aliases, etc.), because we have enough whining
> guys, who don't understand that our ressources are limited. Caring for the
> quality of stuff, that is not part of the official tree is only bad PR, but
> not a win for us, imho.

We generally handle this in games not by marking it WONTFIX (except
rarely) but instead by simply leaving it open, and commenting to the
users what they need to fix before it would be included.  We aren't 100%
stringent on what we require users to fix, and many times we'll fix it
ourselves if it isn't that much and simply note it in the bug for the
user to see.  This tends to lead to users providing better ebuilds in
the future, and also lessens user frustration.  Many users seem to think
that a WONTFIX is non-negotiable.  I tend to agree with them, for the
most part.  Rather than WONTFIX them, simply tell them that they won't
be included as-is.  WONTFIX gives the user the impression that we are
not interested in their work or the package, when this is not the case.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux