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

[Adam Hart]

can we stop this crosspost - I'm sure everyone who subscribes to *-dev,
subscribes to *-users

One idea, have certain people in charge of certain areas of asterisk. In
this case, a cluely developer who knows chan_sip.c well becomes the
maintainer of it, instead of relying on Mark for all bugs. Seems to work
with chan_h323 atm. Don't question Mark's dedication to Asterisk but there's
only 7 days in a week and Mark has many things to do (like developing
digium's hardware)

-Adam


> 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 was originally made at the end of October, and has remained substantially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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