On 21-Jan-07, at 1:02 AM, Darren Oh wrote:
On Jan 20, 2007, at 10:31 PM, Angela Byron wrote:
Sorry, but I totally disagree with this.
Drupal.org provides a built-in means of contacting maintainers to get support: issues tagged "support request" ... responsible maintainers will be watching their issue queues and responding to these.
Angela Byron is an exceptionally responsive developer. Not all responsible maintainers can constantly monitor their issue queues.
I'm not talking about constant monitoring. But issue queues are the main mechanism where features and bug reports are posted. So yes, in order to be a responsible maintainer you _do_ need to be keeping an eye on your queues, or else turn on the feature in project module to get mails sent to them when isues are posted. I'm actually a horribly responsive developer when it comes to my contrib modules. ;) But the second someone posts a, "Hey, looking for a co-maintainer?" issue, I would either promote them, or else respond, "No, I'm just really hitting a busy patch, but if you would care to test some of these patches in the queue and mark them appropriately, I'd really appreciate it." However, if the issue instead languishes for 3 weeks with no response, it would be very easy to make the case that "This maintainer is not taking care of their issue queue," and have one of the Drupal admins make the switch. OTOH, if you send me an e-mail, lots of things could've happened to it: it could've been caught by a spam filter, it could've been an old e-mail address that doesn't get a response anymore, it could've been sent to one of my mail addresses that get filtered as mailing list mails that I only occasionally check, etc. etc. Furthermore, an issue is far preferable, because it could become a single request could grow into a central rallying point for several people who have an interest around a module to collaborate together to take care of it. I've seen this happen with modules from time to time, such as buddylist and privatemsg. So yes, down with e-mail, up with issue queues. :) -Angie