[Asterisk-Dev] Features requests on bugs.digium.com

[Darren Nickerson]

"Josh Roberson" <twisted at indigent-networks.com> wrote:
>> Tilghman Lesher wrote:
>>
>>A bit of history on this:  a few months ago, Mark felt there were too many
>>bugs open on the bugtracker and threatened to shut down new reports if the
>>total number were not quickly reduced.  I don't remember the exact number,
>>but 200 open reports sticks in my mind.  The bug marshals (and I'm one of
>>them, so you can take it as you will) felt that to comply with this order
>>meant that we had to find other places for feature requests, bounties, 
>>etc.,
>>which at the time were all tracked by Mantis.
>>
> Right. And seeing as Mark is the one channel/path that makes the final 
> decision on wether or not things get added/changed/etc in the project, we 
> have no choice to comply.

I'm glad to see this being put in a historical context.

Many of us on this list will be familiar with that period of Asterisk's 
evolution. Things were shifting/evolving pretty rapidly, with a stable CVS 
tree being cut then quickly obsoleted by the pace of development, ... and 
everyone recognizing that eventually a 1.0.0 was going to have to get out 
there ... it was a very fertile and exciting time.

I may be wrong, but I remember Mark's plea to the community being more in 
the spirit of "we need volunteers to triage mantis issues and help us sort 
the wheat from the chaff" rather than him wanting issues aggressively closed 
to meet some arbitrary "acceptable" target.  I defer to your experience here 
though, since you've likely received instruction directly from Mark and 
you've concluded he wants to close feature requests out of Mantis. In which 
case, I'm once again confused as to why this was posted as a discussion 
topic on -devel, instead of just being stated as doctrine.

My point a few posts ago was that maybe things have leveled off enough to 
the point where Asterisk has clearly proven itself production-ready, and 
issues in mantis are no longer mostly show-stoppers. Perhaps it no longer 
imperative (or appropriate) to slash & burn people's bug reports and/or 
feature requests, instead leaving them there some someone else to stumble on 
(and possibly fix), instead of having people just re-report the same ole' 
issue/request. So what if a bug goes stale without feedback from the 
reporter? Leave it open (possible de-prioritized) for someone else who might 
stumble on it and offer a "me too", this time with more details. An example 
of the value of the "me too" phenomenon can be see at:

    http://bugs.digium.com/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=0002023

Despite heroic attempts by Rich Adamson to have this considered a bug (even 
kram has noticed a 'surprising mismatch'), there it languishes as a feature 
request, and STILL it's getting valuable, repeated hits from people who have 
the same problem.

-Darren