Developers, Community, Progress

[Felipe Contreras]

Hi Timo,

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 1:17 AM, Timo Jyrinki <timo.jyrinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/5/2 Richard Allen <ra at ra.is>:
>
> >  Great work on Pidgin, and belive it or not, most of us users are grateful
>  >  for your work and for Pidgin.  Keep up the good work :)
>
>  Yeah, true, I'm a happy Pidgin user. I think one problem Pidgin as a
>  project could be handling better is describing the real state of
>  various developments. Ie. communicating to the outside world.
>
>  Ordinary users always get somewhat detached from the reality of who is
>  actually coding the software (people on their free time), and start
>  piling up hopes on how something should develop. Now many users have
>  become frustrated since they've seen years of talk about the video &
>  voice features, and better MSN support. I believe many of the
>  frustrated voices are vv-hope-to-be-users and MSN users who feel that
>  "nothing is happening". I understand them, since it's really easy to
>  fall towards negative emotions when one realized that it's been years
>  since one thought gaim-vv was going to be merged etc, and almost the
>  same with msnp13/14/15 support.

I agree.

>  I don't know how to put it, but some projects cope better with
>  describing their roadmap and who is working on which features (who the
>  active developers even currently are, giving faces to the "mysterious,
>  distant" developers), keeping some kind of "progress report" somewhere
>  etc. Currently it could be just a wiki page which states (the often
>  (?) stated fact) that no-one is currently working on video & voice,
>  and what are the obstacles (maybe with ticket numbers) that have to be
>  overcome in which parts of libpurple, what actually happened with
>  gaim-vv. Same goes for MSNp14/15, an explanation of past efforts,
>  current status in trunk and why msn-pecan is separate, what is needed
>  for its merge or current p14 code enablement etc.

I think the reason why these things have been slow is because of bad
decisions in the team. Perhaps they prefer to look to the future,
perhaps they don't acknowledge there have been mistakes, or perhaps
they really don't care.

In any case, I don't think there would be any explanation; it would be
ready when it's ready.

>  All of these subjects are such that I've randomly read about on the
>  mailing list, but in reality I'm way more informed than the ordinary
>  user, to whom probably it seems that "nothing is happening" and
>  "nothing is being told to anyone, but I see here and there some
>  unclear explanations on why video & voice or good msn support is still
>  not there". Additionally, given there seem to have been disputes overs
>  some of these issues, it may even seem that the project is not a
>  completely healthy open source project. Not claiming it would be so
>  (still producing very good quality releases etc. from my point of
>  view), but the impression may be such if one tries find out
>  information about these issues and finds the disputes but not the
>  resolutions.

True, but perhaps that's "better", because the resolutions haven't been so good.

Parhain terveisin ;)

-- 
Felipe Contreras