making review/bug filing optional for some docs changes

[Luis Villa]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:45:31 -0800, Joel Peshkin <bugreport at peshkin.net> wrote:
> Luis Villa wrote:
> 
> >>Our customers could not tolerate anything less.
> >>
> >>
> > Wow. That sounds incredibly stiflingly unfun. Glad people are paid to
> >
> >work on this now...
> >
> >
> 
> Bugzilla customers are the people who find enough use for Bugzilla to
> either contribute or to hire people to contribute.  It would be a bad
> idea not to take them seriously.  The same professional standards apply
> regardless of the business model.

I think there is a lot of evidence out there that you can produce
effectively 'enterprise'[1]-quality software and documentation, and
produce it a lot faster and a lot more fun, if you let go a bit and
make it easier for motivated people to contribute.

I'm not saying bugzilla should abandon attempts to make good software-
I'm just saying that adopting strict, nearly traditional methods which
discourage the participation of people who are interested but don't
have tons of time is not the right way to get to professional quality
software when you're not paying people.[2]

If you guys want to create a rigid, painful process, that's fine, but
there are a lot of people out there (like me) who'd like to give small
amounts of quality work to bugzilla. Locking them out because of
unfounded paranoia about the quality of their work, IMHO, is silly-
instead, encourage them to contribute, figure out how to let them see
results quickly  (like wiki or the php documentation), and figure out
how to do whatever quality control is necessary after the fact. I'd
bet that in most cases it'll be a lot less QA work than you think, and
a lot less than you currently do.

Luis

[1] I loathe that word. It implies that regular users don't need or
deserve quality.
[2] in many cases, it isn't the right way when you're paying people
either, but that's a different rant for a different list ;)