Did we really release 8.04? - users as developers

[Pär Lidén]

> 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


I've been working a lot in volunteer organizations (not so much in Ubuntu
though) and IMHO the paid people should focus their work on activating the
volunteers, and on taking as much advantage as possible of the volunteers
work. This includes doing all the boring stuff that volunteers don't want to
do, and certainly caring about (and acting fast on) volunteer submitted
patches. This would require the paid developers to spend less time on
implementing new features themselves, to free up time working with the
volunteers. And that is probably a change that is hard to make, as it may
seem counterproductive in the short run, and may be contrary to the way
people are used to do things.If I've understood things correctly, the Fedora
project works much in this way.

Regards Pär
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