I personally read each and every single comment, pull request, and issue.
That said, I can’t always help, so when I can’t, I don’t say anything.
I just took a month to reply to my own rant here. I don’t fault anyone else in the community for the valuable time they contribute.
There isn’t really a process, as almost nobody is actually paid to
work on Rails. People do the work when they feel like it and however
much they feel like it, and everyone has their own process.
That said, of course, we do make sure that there aren’t known
regressions in releases, things like that.
“There isn’t really a process” is totally fine, but there should be a better way for us to see what’s going on.
Maybe there could be a wider role for prioritizing tickets. Reviews and +1s on issues are one thing, but how can anyone find the issues that should float to the top of the “priority list” (which seems like there is none) and get more attention from the community? Sorting through hundreds of open, untagged issues is pretty daunting.
It could even be as simple as a “focus” tag with a capped number of important items (pseudo-kanban style), rolled & reviewed periodically.
Or be more aggressive about assigning tickets to milestones, even if provisionally: currently there’s ONE open issue for 4.0.1 and 3.2.14 each, and I’m sure there are many more that should be included there.
I think more visibility into the issue list would help the community to move things along a lot better. It helps to know where to push.
As a community member, what can I do to help?
Ask for reproductions on issues that don’t have them, writing
reproductions is even better. Verify that older bugs haven’t gotten
‘accidentally’ fixed and are still an issue. Write patches for bugs
that are open.
Yup, I get it… it’s just that if I want to invest the time to pick at issues from the sidelines, I’d like to know whether I’m advancing the next item in the pipe, or if it’s just an obscure “nice to have” that’ll eventually fade away.
Cheers all,
Andrew Vit