[Asterisk-Dev] Bug Tracker / Feature Requests (my take)

[Steven Critchfield]

On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 16:47 -0600, Michael Giagnocavo wrote:
> >So, generally I guess, my overall feeling is that the bug tracker should 
> >primarily be focused around things which are active -- primarily bugs and 
> >feature requests with patches.  It also seems like a good starting place 
> >for features even without patches in case they're very easy....
> 
> But does that help Asterisk respond to end-user needs? Some of the people
> who might most need features (and be willing to buy hardware, services,
> whatever) might not even know what C is.

Then one of the services they are willing to buy should be programming
by someone who can do what they need. 

> >At some point though, there needs to be a way to both get them out of the 
> >way of myself and the other bug marshals when trying to work on higher 
> >priority bugs and features with patches and retain high S/N.  Likewise 
> >feature requests with bounties should be centralized so that people 
> >looking to add to asterisk but get a bounty in return can find them 
> >easily.
> 
> Do you think having the community at large vote on issues would help then?
> This would somewhat spread out the responsibility of the bug marshals to
> each and every person in the community.

Voting by end users would be bad. End users would vote for redundant
features as they don't understand how to use what is already available
to them. If you chose to limit it to developers, then you run into the
trouble of qualifying a person as eligible. I used to be proficient
enough to consider myself a developer, but I have kept busy elsewhere
and am not nearly as proficient as I used to be.

> I think Asterisk needs to have a system that's designed for *community*, not
> just a bug tracker (which are usually designed for a development team).

The trouble being which part of the community is important right now.
The developer community is most important to most of us as they make
sure we get new features at all. The end user community is more of a
drain the a contribution. Even Mark has mentioned how disproportionate
our developers to users ratio is to most other projects.  

-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>