[Asterisk-Dev] benevolent dictatorship, or inclusive developper community?

[asterisk at lists.styx.org]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 06:09:33PM -0600, Mark Spencer wrote:

\begin{sarcasm}

> > the only thing that i can think at this point is that
> > mark doesn't want sip to work through nat.
>
> Right, you've caught me.  My goal has always been to prevent SIP from
> actually working in Asterisk, because deep down I really just want the
> whole project to fail.

\end{sarcasm}

> Or maybe it's because (a) I was on "vacation" for two weeks and 

Sure, but this is in the queue for some time. that particular patch
was originally made at the end of October, and has remained substantially
unchanged since (except for some variable naming) ...

> (b) nobody has brought the bug/patch to my attention.

... and has been the subject of a thread on this mailing list that 
was still going at the end of December. Come now, that's not true.
I have mentioned it to you on IRC as well.

But this is just a case in point.

> > i am getting very frustrated with digium's "benevolent
> > dictatorship" of this project.
> 
> Then how about contributing by becoming a bug maintainer.  You can talk to
> Brian West and he'll give you all the details you need.  Brian and the
> other bug maintainers get special access to get bugs through, but the only
> way to "scale" me is to have all the preprocessing done ahead of time

I am a bug maintainer, but too many of the bugs just get tagged as 
"accepted" -- as is policy I am told -- and nothing is done with them.
But there is a bigger problem.

> (make sure bug reports have backtraces if appropriate, are filtered, that
> patches have already been tested, etc).

Some minimal amount of testing must be done before the changes go into
CVS. But, it seems to me that CVS should be, explicitly, caveat utilisator.
It should not be guaranteed to compile or run or do anything useful other
than to have people testing new stuff.

CVS code /is/ for testing.

It emphatically should not be the rule to be using CVS code in production.
This is why releases should be made from time to time, as often as
possible, of known or thought good code. People that run this stuff
in production should run releases. CVS is for developers only.

> > is it time to start thinking about a fork?
> 
> No, it's time to get more people helping.  We *do* have a structure to
> Asterisk development that involves external help but what tends to happen
> is that people only care about their one bug or feature and as soon as
> that's taken care of, they lose interest in doing the hard work and effort
> it takes to process bug reports and feature requests. Only Brian West has
> really stuck with the task, and he definitely will need some help.  If you
> want to help, talk to Brian and he'll get you all the info you need.

Yes, I agree, Brian has done a lot of very good work and is a great
boon to the Asterisk community. But from my experience, what I can see
happening is, someone writes a patch and has to spend so long pestering
you to get the patch imported into CVS that repeating the experience
begins to seem a waste of time. So they lose interest.

As well, if CVS code comes with no guarantees, and people are strongly
warned to run the stable snapshots in production, letting more than one
single person commit changes becomes less of a problem. If someone commits
something that's wrong, just take it out. No harm done. It moves the
dialogue of the development team into the source code where it should be
and out of IRC, which has its place but is not where everyone wants to
spend their time.

-w

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