Ah, yes, I suppose that is my typical pattern.
I've been feeling verbose lately, so I'm going to subject you to a long
analysis of your analysis :)
On one hand, it's certainly useful to understand what folks on "the
outside" feel would be helpful. We've had that sort of conversation each
year at the conference. Sometimes there are revelations; though I suspect
that this particular example (the ease of contributing doc comments) is
probably well known among the players.
On the other hand, it's very easy to to misunderstand exactly how small a
group is behind something like Pike. It's very common for people to look
at Pike as an "organization" and compare it to Perl or PHP.
It's true that there may be 10 people who are working on this sort of
"support infrastructure" and assume that the same is true for Pike,
if only they [the Pike "people"] knew what people wanted. As one might
say, "a design is nice, but an implementation is even better". In
the Pike world, the reality is that you have maybe half of such a person,
so things often end with the suggestion.
I know I've gotten involved with crossing off some of these "non-core"
development projects in the past; not so much because it's what I really
want to be doing, but because I feel like something ought to be done, and
and whatever poor effort I produce is better than nothing (and might even
encourage others to participate).
I'm not sure if there's a sense that the barrier to contribution is set
too high or if there just aren't many people interested in giving back. I
suspect that most people could contribute something but don't for whatever
reason. Personally I blame all of you Swedes for being such experts and
intimidating the newbies. :)
Having said all of that, I had a conversation with someone about getting
this particular wish-list item crossed off. I'm inclined to let him run
with it, as it'd be good to have another person involved rather than me
doing yet another project. Hopefully he won't be frightened off by the
responsibility he now bears and we'll have some progress on that front in
the next few months.
Bill
On Tue, 9 Dec 2008, Johan Sundström (Achtung Liebe!) @ Pike (-) importmöte för
mailinglistan wrote:
> You go at it without implying that someone else oughtta do this,
> taking responsibility for doing what you feel ought to be done, and in
> the process giving others the best possible chances to join in, rather
> than feeding a todo list into the void with attached sentiments of
> "it's somewhat shameful you haven't already done this", which
> admittedly is very easy to happen to do unwittingly.
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