[asterisk-dev] Bugs/patches 16033 and 16590 ignored forever

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Kirill 'Big K' Katsnelson wrote:

> Now, an interesting observation. When I report a bug, it gets fixed by a 
> developer, I confirm the fix works, and it gets into the 1.6 branches. 
> Now, If I both report and fix the same bug, it is doomed to  sit there 
> forever. That raises another question -- that is a strong disincentive 
> for me to send in a patch *even if I have one*. Instead, I should 
> consider my fix "a temporary hack" and then throw it away when an 
> "official" fix is implemented by somebody else.

That may have been the case with your previous issues, but there is only
a correlation, not causation. Attaching patches to issues does *not* in
any way lower their priority for being addressed, in fact it raises the
priority.

As Leif said, the Asterisk development team addresses as many issues as
they can in every four week sprint (lately that has been a relatively
large number of issues, 80 or more if I remember correctly). Because
there are not infinite resources to apply to working on issues, when
each sprint starts, the entire pool of available issues is sorted by a
difficulty, priority and benefit weighting system, and then the issues
at the top of the list get allocated to people until their available
time is completely allocated. Four weeks later, the process starts over.

Given the resource limitations, it is not at all possible to address
every issue that is open in any reasonable period of time, so we have
had no choice but to develop a process that attempts to address the most
important, highest impact issues. That, by definition, means some issues
will never get addressed unless additional resources (either at Digium
or in the community) are brought to bear, but that's how it works in all
open source projects. When resources are limited, they have to be
applied to the issues that have the biggest impact on the user community.

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Digium, Inc. | Director of Software Technologies
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
skype: kpfleming | jabber: kfleming at digium.com
Check us out at www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org