Re: Bug statistics

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Dan Nicolaescu <dann@gnu.org>
>> Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:28:19 -0400
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> IMO the main problem is man power.
>
> 100% agreement.
>
> Someone(TM) should check whether the switch to Bazaar made the number
> and rate of contributions from non-core developers higher.

Not sure how easy is it to measure that, we've also had a feature
freeze in place for a while which skews results.

Speaking for myself (TM): the switch to Bazaar made it MUCH HARDER to contribute.
It takes 5-15 minutes (sometimes even longer) to check in anything,
even for trivial changes.
If making / testing a change is quicker than the time to check it in,
it makes one think twice before trying to do anything.

I am not sure if the "smart server" for bzr would help, but the
current one is just doing some very effective negative advertising.
One has to wonder why it even exists, given that it performs so badly.

> should look for ways to attract more contributors, because the current
> resources of manpower are evidently not large enough.

Attracting contributors always helps, but it's also a question of
better using the current contributors.  
There are many many discussions on the list that end with nothing
because there's no clear authority that can make a final decision, and
nobody feels particularly responsible to do so.  
admin/MAINTAINERS is a good example: it lists a tiny amount of the
files in the tree.
IMHO there's a need for more distributed responsibility.