From: Dominik Riebeling <dominik.riebeling_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:18:59 +0200

On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 1:17 PM, Antony Stone
<Antony.Stone_at_rockbox.open.source.it> wrote:
> Ah, sorry. I was working from the premise that even open source projects try
> to produce something that a large number of people want to use - not just the
> developers themselves.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I give a shit about users -- in
fact, I'm working on Rockbox Utility which *is* a user tool -- but the
main question is how you look at the issue. There are three options:
1. from a users point of view. Development is concentrated to make it
the best experience for users.
2. from a developers point of view. User opinions aren't of interest
but only what devs want. You might think I'm looking that way, but I
go with the following
3. from the projects point of view. You need to ask "what's best for
the project, and what pushes the project forward?". If you do that
you'll quickly notice that it's important to make life easier for
those doing the work, and those are the devs. If they get drowned in
feature requests (especially absolutely pointless request we already
exclude in the tracker guidelines -- obviously quite some people don't
read them -- like "port to player X", "Ipod Nano 2G needed urgently",
"Help, my player won't turn on" etc.) they get annoyed and will most
likely constantly ignore them. From my point of view we currently
somewhat have this situation. So making feature request more valuable
and pre-sorted would increase the possibility of someone actually
looking at them.


 - Dominik
Received on 2008-06-22