You Say You Want a Revolution? Well, You Know …
The below is an open letter to Matt Mullenweg.
You wrote:
Bug reports (feed type A does B wrong) are far more useful than calls for a feed revolution.
Okay, you addressesed specific bugs in the comments, Matt. But let’s also face facts here: bug logging was on Trac for a while, and then Mosquito, and then maybe back to Trac. I think? I’m not sure. I’m completely lost as to where the hell I’m supposed to be filing my bugs. Maybe the information’s out there, and maybe I missed it somewhere along the way, but … I’m not a complete clueless WordPress newbie, and when I last had a bug, I had no damn idea where to file it. [I did finally find that WP was back to using Trac, and filed the bug, which has resolved, but ... for no real reason that I can determine.]
If you want bugs filed, we need an equivalent of a neon sign pointing us to it, and we need a system that’s got a fair amount of openness. Trac annoys me that I have to log in to even view the doggone bug [I know this because I had to log in to view the two bugs you fixed].
And as to fomenting a revolution: how is this entry, making a suggestion in the framework of the way I like to do it [not just bitching about a problem, but trying to suggest a solution, even if it's not the right one], fomenting a revolution?
How is it any different than my calls to have a user registration system? You never seemed to feel that I was fomenting a revolution then. I can’t find your comments, but you seemed happy about it then.
I mean, do you want me to start a revolution? If you do, please let me know. I’m really good at invective and rhetoric.
Methinks that Matt seems a bit too sensitive about what otherwise seems like constructive criticism.
June 16th, 2005 at 00:27The dilemma is we don’t want the bug tracker becoming so cluttered with psuedo-bugs that it becomes a developer time-suck and loses its effectiveness. We need Trac gardeners like we have Codex gardeners. I generally only recommend a savvy user like yourself file a bug.
We always used Mosquito for bugs until we switched to Trac after the latest release. We were using Trac for browsing the source and showing changesets for a while before that, but not bugs. We just recently figured out how to import everything from Mosquito into it.
My “revolution” remark was simply that the specific suggestions didn’t quite fit what was being described as the problem. Show me the canyon before you sell me a bridge. It the case Scott pointed out someone’s lack of upgrading was causing the problem, there wasn’t anything to fix in WP. I’m not denying that there very well could be problems with our feeds, particularly atom 0.3.
June 16th, 2005 at 04:51