Developer motivation (Re: Done)
On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 11:43:37PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Good on you. Now, tell me again, if it takes a stranger to a
> package less than a minute to come up with a decent description, why
> in hells name are all these *MAINTAINERS*, for gods sake, whinging
> and crying all over the mailing list that no one has provided them
> with a patch for the bloody description?
It is the same reason that they leave so many other trivial bugs open
forever, or don't produce quality packages in the first place. They either
don't have time, or don't care about the quality of their packages. Why
aren't *YOU*, who seem to care so deeply about these bugs, filing patches
right now?
The fact is that this mass filing was completely automated, and the
submitter did not read the original descriptions, much less attempt a new
one. And yet the bugs were filed with severity "important". Surely such a
pressing issue resulting in hundreds of important bugs deserves more effort
than this. Something that is worth filing hundreds of bugs over, of any
kind, is also worth a couple of hours of review. When I did the last mass
spelling check, I not only read the text to try to reduce my own errors (I
still made some, inevitably), I provided a patch for every single
description I changed to correct the errors I found. Over 100 of these bugs
are still open, and many more were only fixed because the packages were
removed. But almost *900* were fixed by the maintainer, either by applying
the patch or improving the description manually, removing the errors.
Bugs (non-RC ones at least) are not a force to get work done in Debian; they
are an informational service for maintainers.
> Is the alleged intention of the membership to create the best
> distribution ever a thing of the past?
There is no hive mind. Each member's work springs from his own motivation.
You are creating the best distribution for you.
--
- mdz
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