[sldev] Upcoming viewer releases?

[Rob Lanphier]

On 8/28/07 8:43 PM, Hamncheese wrote:
> Although this is my first open source project so I don't have much
> existing wisdom, there are two things that I think would broaden
> contributions:
> 1) - Get rid of the "you don't have a signed contribution/legal
> agreement so we can't accept your fix" Maybe for features you could
> keep this, but drop it for bug fixes. It's unnecessary and cumbersome
> and the only reason I have an agreement on file was because I bored
> that week. By signing into jira I consider that my patch will be part
> of the source. I'd be curious to what others think on this but it
> seems to me that asking for a signature is nothing more than CYA and I
> don't see other open source projects doing this.

This is a necessity, and is very common.  Sun and Novell are two
prominent examples.  The Free Software Foundation even has one.

Many open source projects don't have this type of agreement because they
start as just a side project, and balloon out from there.  Once you've
accepted too many significant contributions sans contribution agreement,
it's too late to retrofit. 

> 2) - Assign several developers whose primary job is to see that
> contributions are funneled through the system. One of the reasons that
> this is necessary is that contributions that are coming from the
> community are by their very nature what interests or bugs us. To see
> patches languish (mine or others) is a death knell for follow-on work.
> The community is currently at the mercy of whomever ("you", "them",
> "they", "Lindens", whatever word you want to use here) finally has
> enough time to look at the contribution.

Which is more important:
a.  A new feature implementation from the community that may have a
destabilizing effect on the viewer
b.  A bugfix to fix a stability problem, not necessarily from the community

We're reasonably fast about picking up bugfixes these days, and would be
faster with more help from the community in bubbling them up on the bug
triage agendas.  The developers who might be "assigned" to see that
contributions are funneled through the system happen to be very good at
"b". 

This is made even harder by the fact that people don't get "assigned" at
Linden Lab.  They choose their assignments.  One thing that the
community could do to help on this front is to make Linden Lab
developers *want* this gig.  I'll continue to stress the importance of
doing this work and being more transparent in our development process,
but this will go much smoother if you all can make sure that it's a
valuable, enjoyable, fulfilling, and productive investment of time.

Rob


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