Testing reports

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Tue Apr 17 11:09:08 EDT 2012


Michael Leone <turgon at mike-leone.com> writes:

> On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 8:07 AM, Colin Scott <gnucash at double-bars.net> wrote:
>>
>> I sincerely hope those who control the project will give serious consideration to my comments about a mission-statement ...
>
> Who actually controls this project? Is there someone who actual
> dictates priorities, and a roadmap of what features will be fixed, and
> when, and what new features are to be in the next release?

Nobody.  Some of us who have been around a long time provide
architectural guidance, but frankly I spend more time on the mailing
lists and IRC answering questions than I do coding for this project.
Developers decide what features they want to implement, or they talk
hard enough to convince other developers to work on it.

> Is there an official project leader? Is that person elected, like the
> Debian Project Leader, perhaps from the developer pool?

No, there is not.  There have been loosly defined "lead developers" over
time, but those roles have more been self-appointed than "voted".  For
example, about a decade ago people were calling me lead developer, but
that was mostly because I was doing the vast majority of work at the
time.  Lately I would call Christian that, as he has been doing lots of
work.  But of course there have always been a cadre of developers who
scratch their own itches, and that's fine.

While this is still a community, it doesn't mean you (or anybody) can
demand anything from anyone else.  If GnuCash works for you, great.  If
you want to send your accolades, thank you!  If you want to file bug
reports, bravo!  If you want to complain without offering some
constructive help, well, you get what you pay for.  But because this is
a community we DO ask everyone to help.  Yes, we do frequently ask
"where is the patch?", and the reason is that talk is cheap.  It's easy
to type up an email that says "you suck, this program sucks, blah de
blah blah."  It's much harder to write up a constructive suggestion that
not only shows the problem, but shows a way to fix it.  But as before,
developers decide what they work on, so you either have to be very
convincing in your argument or you need to do a lot of the work
yourself.  This is a community, and we ask everyone to join in and help
raise the barn.

>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available


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