Fostering developers (was Re: Feature Request)

[David Miller]

Jouni Heikniemi wrote:

> However, at that point I also often lacked the authority and the 
> knowledge to really help people through the hard decisions. Deferring to 
> the senior team was costly in terms of time - and this problem has grown 
> worse ever since. It's this particular scenario I believe to be the 
> chief culprit for making Bugzilla development harder than it perhaps 
> should be.

Yeah, this pretty well sums it up right there.  It is about 2 years ago 
now I think that a very significant chunk of the senior team suddenly 
got new jobs that took up a lot of their time and didn't leave much for 
Bugzilla.  And unfortunately it was enough of the senior team that there 
wasn't anyone with enough know-how about the project to be able to step 
in and take over (because all of those folks kind of went AWOL at once).

And then it all just snowballed from there.

For those that didn't hear through other channels already (like my blog 
or on IRC), I got hired by the Mozilla Foundation last week.  My primary 
responsibilities will be system administration tasks, however there will 
probably be some time for Bugzilla that can be squeezed in there, 
particularly when there are features they need for mozilla.org's 
Bugzilla.  They also only hired me part time (25 hours per week).  After 
a careful review of the family finances with my wife, we decided we 
could make it work on that level of income, and so I opted to just leave 
my employment at that rather than picking up another job to make up the 
difference, with the express purpose of being able to spend the rest of 
that free time on Bugzilla.  Last week, because of the Firefox 1.0 
release, I got in lots of extra hours because we had to set up and/or 
reconfigure a half a dozen servers on the fly to pick up the extra load. 
:)  This week and probably next, I'll be in catch-up mode.  I've got two 
years of partially ignoring the mailing lists and most of my bugmail to 
catch up on.

The reviewers list on the website got updated yesterday.  It's now 
accurate.  There are people I will accept reviews from that are not on 
that list, and that I will probably ask to do reviews from time to time, 
but I took off everyone who hasn't actually done any reviews in the last 
6 months, since if they're not around to do regular reviews, there's no 
point in telling people to make requests of them.  I also added on 
several of the new people that we've added to the review team over the 
last couple months that hadn't been added to it yet (and who have been 
some of the more active reviewers, despite them not being listed for 
people to know they could make requests of them).  Those are the folks 
who it makes sense to have listed, since they'll be the fastest to 
respond. :)

The roadmap page is next on my list on the website.  I'm going to 
attempt to get that cleaned up right after I finish reviewing this patch 
I keep promising Joel I'm going to tackle :)

-- 
Dave Miller      Project Leader, Bugzilla Bug Tracking System
http://www.justdave.net/             http://www.bugzilla.org/