Did we really release 8.04? - users as developers

[Vincenzo Ciancia]

Il giorno lun, 07/07/2008 alle 13.22 -0700, Bryce Harrington ha scritto:
> 
> So I would encourage looking at ways we can help the average bug
> reporter take on more of the work of troubleshooting the bugs they
> find.  After all, they by definition already have the necessary
> equipment and environment for doing the testing.  The first step is to
> have good, detailed documentation to make the process as 'paint by
> numbers' as possible for them

The first step is maybe to start taking in much higher account users
contributions. My experience is that patches can stay in launchpad for
months and in those cases it is entirely up to who contributed those to
bother people until they ack a fix. I am not talking about my often
blind one-liners but of many fixes I have actually seen and used. This
is clearly due to lack of manpower to review patches, but this is a cat
eating its tail: one user learns how to help because there are too few
developers, and there are too few developers to take advantage of her
work.

Maybe a patch queue could be created, and some people allocated to work
on patch review, merging and backporting (via the backport repository I
mean). Publicizing this would encourage people to provide fixes (or at
least, keeping patches in launchpad for months without looking at them
will discourage people to contribute at all).

Vincenzo