Re: related to an XEmacs BTS

Mats Lidell writes: Uh, this is a volunteer project creating free software. There's nothing that *needs* to be done, because anybody who wants it done always can just do it (if necessary, in a fork). You suggest (by writing "ought") that this is somehow an obligation of the developers. It is not. For XEmacs, that was settled in long and acrimonious discussion in which I lost a lot of goodwill from other developers, as well as the argument. Basically, developers in this project have no obligation to do anything except produce good code according to their own standards, and to not damage the results of others' work. All other "obligations" are self-imposed. I will say that such volunteers are rewarded with respect and other "good and valuable consideration" in this project in my experience. And the core developers do pitch in and help greatly when somebody takes a valuable initiative. The project does (mostly :-/) "work" under this minimalist "social contract." But often, as with a bug tracker, that initiative has be backed up with a long-term work commitment. I'm willing to shoulder some of the work, Mike is too, but up to now the offers that we've had are hosting and site admin---not bug tracking. I'm sorry, the host and the software help, but alone they are low value-added. This project has plenty of access to hosts, and several core developers are able and willing to install and admin software on them. It's the bug tracking *work*, today, tomorrow, and the next day, that is the sticking point. In this project, under the current "social contract", that is not an obligation of the developers. With Mike pushing it, we now have a critical mass of core support for an ITS and it will happen. But without new volunteers we can't do it *well*. On a day-to-day basis, we need people to assign bugs to developers, to classify them so users can search them, and critically evaluate the classifications and admin interface so that we can improve them. (One reason I'm pushing Roundup is that I know that its architecture can in principle support a lot of improvement and innovation in those areas without a major rewrite, and I know I can personally do the work (if nobody beats me to it ;-).) Even an hour a week of assignment and classification work from two or three people would make a big difference in the quality of the database. Regards, Steve (By the way, I believe that most of the Review Board would sign on to much of what I wrote above, although they might prefer to word it differently. But I do not claim that my views are representive of the Review Board here.) _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta