My experience with current'ish git
Denys Vlasenko
vda.linux at googlemail.com
Mon Jun 29 14:13:21 UTC 2009
Hi Slava, all,
I am happy to see that your development efforts on MC did not remain
just good intentions.
Now you face a har part: how to make your project successful.
I will try to help, at least by reporting bugs.
Currently, I have 5 bugs reported total. One is already fixed:
#411 make loops, rerunning configure ad infinitum
and I can confirm it works now. Thanks!
This one is marked as a dup:
#1386 editor: F7 search does not remember last search string across
editing sessions
These are open:
#414 Regression: shell patterns in copy dialog do not work
#1384 Whitespace highlighting should be optional
#1385 File search dialog is more difficult to use compared to 4.6.1
A word on the project in general.
Any open-source project requires not only technical skill, but also
some social skills. Projects fail when they are closed-minded, where
developers assume "I'm the boss - you are the idiot" mentality.
It is not always easy to remember that users come to you with their
complains because they are using your software, and something is not
working right. Indirectly, they bring you an important thing:
they do debugging for you in various scenarios you personally
never use.
Caring for users' bug reports and bugs in bugzilla is not a very
inspiring work, but if you do it regularly, you are taking
an "invisible" advantage of the work users already did before
they wrote an email/bug report: *they diagnosed a problem for you*.
You do not need to do it by now.
And also you show users that their efforts are not wasted.
It's very frustrating to spend days creating a bug report
for a project, only to see it staying open for months/years,
with not a single comment from developers...
Don't let your users feel this way.
If you can't fix it right away, at least let reporter know
what you think: "It is not a bug" (explain why),
"This is easy to fix", "This is hard to fix" etc.
Sometimes you can write in a few lines how this can be fixed
(after all, you know the source better than the reporter,
and may see what the solution will be), and hint that it will
go faster "if someone can try to make a patch"
and user will do it for you! ;) ;)
Yes, some users are newbies, and some are real idiots who can abuse
your attention. But not all of them. Filter out idiots,
direct newbies to Google/Wiki/other info sources,
work with the rest.
If you'll do it, you'll notice that some of your users will start
helping you more. They will send patches, not just bug reports.
Don't know how useful above mumblings are... those are just my thoughts
about ways to be a successful project.
--
vda
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