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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Allow money donations for precise bugs
From:       David Jarvie <lists () astrojar ! org ! uk>
Date:       2005-03-12 23:08:11
Message-ID: 200503122308.12371.lists () astrojar ! org ! uk
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On Saturday 12 Mar 2005 21:09, Maurizio Colucci wrote:
> Stephan Binner wrote:
> > On Saturday 12 March 2005 09:24, Mathias Homann wrote:
> >>It wouldnt mean that the kde developers have no say anymore...
> >
> > "2. when, and if, the *overall* donation for a given feature reaches a
> >  certain threshold, that feature is *guaranteed* to be implemented."
> >
> > reads different to me.
>
> There is a post where I discuss the meaning of the word "guarantee".
>
> Hovever, in brief: the guarantee that the feature will be implemented can
> be relaxed to a guarantee that the feature will be *worked on*.
>
> Currently I believe this is the best compromise because, otherwise, a
> developer could be tempted to deliver bad code just to make it look like he
> fulfilled his duty.

Some features could require large amounts of effort to implement, or would 
need basic architecture changes, while others might be trivial. You can't 
make both categories of bug subject to the same guarantee without any 
distinction.

If someone is willing to pay money for a feature which needs lots of effort, 
this could mean that developers divert most of their effort away from other 
more serious faults, resulting in a poorer product overall. The developers 
must still have some say as to which bugs receive priority.

And if money was pledged, there might be a temptation for people to rush off 
to fix feature requests without coordinating with other people, resulting in 
people duplicating effort. There would have to be some system for nominating 
one or more specific developers to work on these bugs.

Overall, although the idea sounds potentially useful, I am very doubtful about 
whether it is particularly practical or desirable.


As a semi-aside, the bug tracking system currently doesn't seem to make votes 
for bugs very easy to determine when a developer looks at those assigned to 
him. For example, I only noticed when I closed one of the bugs against me, 
that it had votes. Since I hadn't looked at the bug report page for a while 
before that, I hadn't realised that anybody had voted for it. So the votes 
were useless in influencing how I expended my effort. The list of bugs shown 
in response to a bug tracking query needs to show vote totals against each 
bug.

Cheers,
David.
 
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