[Asterisk-Users] Important: The Asterisk Bug Tracker

[Mark Spencer]

Okay fellow Asterisk users...  Listen up (or perhaps more appropriately,
"read down").

The Asterisk community is growing at a remarkable pace.  I know there are
thousands of you out there -- in fact there are over eight *thousand*
subscribers to asterisk-users alone, and almost one *thousand* registered
users on the bug tracker.  The #asterisk IRC channel is consistently in
the top 10 channels on freenode.  There is even an Asterisk community on
Orkut with at least 170 members in it.

However, even as large as Asterisk's community is, you may be shocked to
discover that we've got *five* -- that's right *five*, as in you can count
them on one hand, bug marshals who are trying to help coordinate the bug
tracking.

That means that less than 1/10th of 1% of all subscribed asterisk users,
and about 1/2 of 1% of all registered bug reports are participating in the
bug resolution process itself.

In spite of the time that I spend, and those of the other marshals, on the
bugs, due to Asterisk's tremendous growth, bugs and feature requests are
coming in faster than they can be resolved, and we're facing an critical
dilemma, which is that if we don't get the direction of bugs going the
other way, the bug tracker will effectively become useless.

Open Source software does not require that everyone participate in every
project, but it *does* require that *some* number of people take an active
role in supporting the project if it is to succeed.  I've tried with
varying success to get more Asterisk users to participate in this critical
portion of development, and have dedicated 5-10 hours of my time per week
to work on the bug tracker -- only a small portion of which has been used
by the bug marshals.

So, I'm facing an important decision point, and I'm giving you all a
little bit of heads up notice.  We're either going to have to get more
Asterisk users to participate as bug marshals, or at some point we're
going to have to close the bug tracker to new bugs.  I've decided to draw
that line in the sand at 300 bugs.  That is to say, if we are unable to
get enough bug marshals to assist with the process to turn this tide
around, when the bug tracker shows 300 outstanding bugs (there are
currently 279), I will have the bug tracker shut down for new bugs until
the ones currently in it are digested so that it can retain some semblance
of usefulness.

So, what is involved in being a bug marshal, and what are the benefits you
might wonder.  Being a bug marshal requires:

 1) A serious time commitment of a few hours a week.

 2) An understanding of the bug tracker, the importance and method for
    doing backtraces and coredump analysis.  If you don't know this, we
    can teach you, it's not very hard.

 3) The personal discipline to follow through with bugs and see them to
    completion, including testing, making sure disclaimers are on file,
    and getting someone with commit access to apply the fixes.

And what are the benefits?

 1) It's one of the best ways to contribute to the community and the
    project at large.

 2) You get to select (within some basic guidelines) which bugs and
    features are important to you.

 3) You get direct access to high level Asterisk developers, including
    myself, for the purpose of working on these bugs.

 4) Brian K. West probably won't be as rude to you as he normally is.

Not to mention, I would appreciate it.  If you want to be a bug marshal,
do NOT reply to this e-mail, just find bkw_ or one of the other bug
marshals on #asterisk on irc.freenode.net and let them know you're ready
to participate, and they'll give you the information you need.

Thanks to all of you who have supported Asterisk through Digium hardware
purchases, code contributions, being bug marshals, writing documentation,
notating things in the wiki, donating bandwidth, and so much more.  And as
for the rest of you out there, I hope to see some of you come forward to
support and work to improve the project that you use and (hopefully)
value.

Mark