[Python-Dev] No response to posts (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Aug 3 16:05:31 CEST 2010

Steve, thanks for your care-full reply.

Steve Holden writes:

Particularly when the issue tracker works ...

Well, sometimes it's down. But Roundup is more flexible as a database engine than a lot of people realize. Better docs would help, I'm sure, but we can also create new standard queries quite easily. While it's not really possible to get good statistics on time-to-close, for example, we can do a pretty good job of identifying "ignored" issues, and we can target reducing the count to some extent.

It seems to me that something would be really wrong if nobody cared about the relatively few issues that had received no response.

Phrased as "care about", that's a straw man. Pretty much everybody cares about those issues. Phrased as "care for", well, now we've found the friction, I suspect. Applying real TLC to many of the hangfire issues is going to require highlevel skills and/or lots of time, resources that are scarce around here (because they're being applied to other important tasks).

The fact that Mark is on that case means that those who want to shrug their shoulders about it can do so.

Indeed, that's the way I feel about it. But Mark clearly doesn't think he alone is enough. There's a genuine difference of opinion here somewhere, even if I've misrepresented Mark's opinion.

Maybe it would help if we scheduled a bug day, and try to make sure that a couple senior devs rendezvous with Mark so he can advocate some of the issues that bother him the most, and he can get a look at the issue resolution process in action.

I see the current efforts to ensure that new issues all receive an effective as complementary to the other activities that have always taken place.

Again, there's friction here. Somebody said that it's really no help if the acknowledgment is automatic, and that's true. The reply was that a polite response from a human isn't necessarily going to be much better unless there's real help in it, and that's true too. As I understand Mark, that's a lot of his frustration; he doesn't yet know enough to be of genuine help in most of the issues he handles, so he has to be satisfied with either dropping it on the floor again, or sending out an embarrassing "Hi, I'm from the Python triage team, and I'm sorry to tell you that after five years of dead silence, we still have nothing to say." Anyway, I know I find that frustrating when I have to do it!

Where do we find the resources to provide that "real help"? Again, maybe one bug day to show what can be done, and then more or less regularly-scheduled bug days to keep up the momentum?

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