On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 10:15:38AM -0600, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> Although there are category leaders, their involvement varies. It
> wouldn't surprise me at all to find that there were no
> "bin-bug-people" at all, same for "misc" and "lib". The way it really
> works: any one can subscribe to get all the bug reports, and probably
> most developers do. When a developer sees something that interests
> him, or that he's responsible for, he fixes it right away. If it
> doesn't get fixed quickly, there's no escalation procedure; it just
> stays in the database until someone happens to pick it up, maybe for
> a long time.

The result of this is people submit bugfixes and new features but they
never get committed. This makes people feel like they're contributions
aren't wanted, and so they don't bother. 

To make it worse, sometimes a person with commit access will tell a
person publically "if you want feature XYZ, go ahead and help out
with the work." Uh, why should anyone help out with feature XYZ when
patches for features and bugs ABC, DEF, GHI, and JKL are sitting in the
gnats database ignored for (possibly) years?

I really hate it when I see friends of mine at a coffee shop and they
tell me "My patches for such-and-such STILL haven't been even commented
on, much less committed!" All I can do is nod because I understand
their frustration.

And none of this even includes the case of a person committing a patch
and someone else comes along and backs the patch out because of 
objections that lack merit. Man, that really pisses me off. 
-- 
Kevin P. Neal                                http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/

   "I like being on the Daily Show." - Kermit the Frog, Feb 13 2001