From: Bryan Childs <godeater_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:29:38 +0000 (UTC)

Antony Stone <Antony.Stone <at> rockbox.open.source.it> writes:

>
> On Sunday 22 June 2008 13:18, Dominik Riebeling wrote:
>
> - approve some small number of people onto the "developer" team (basically
> give them greater access rights to the tracker system, not necessarily the
> code repository) who don't contribute code but do deal with bug reports
> (qualifying them, posting to the users list to see if other people can
> reproduce them) and feature requests (cancelling the stupid ones, marking the
> duplicates, asking on the users list about the ambiguous ones) so that the
> tracker becomes more valuable and is to some extent pre-vetted and pre-sorted
> for the rest of the developers who would do the actual coding?

There are already such people (I'm one of them), but as a not-quite-developer, I
still feel obliged to run my decision to close tracker tasks past developers
when I'm not certain about them, and in cases where I haven't I still sometimes
get a "why did you close task X, it's a bit pathetic, but I wouldn't object to
it" from some developers.

Even in cases where it's very clear cut when the task should just get closed,
the sheer volume of them in the tracker, especially the repetitive ones, makes
it a pretty soul destroying job. I've not had the heart to do it for some months
now, with the result that the tracker is probably in a worse state now than it's
been in for a long time.
 
> Just as people who don't code can greatly benefit a project by working on the
> documentation, it seems there might be a gap here for people to help smooth
> the whole process of the tracker/s whilst not losing valuable user input in
> the first place?

There is yes, but the problem here is that there's not much satisfaction in
doing such a job. There's no end product that you can look at and go "I did
that", or even something that you can take pleasure in using afterwards.

Bryan
Received on 2008-06-23