There are several hundred bugs still open in the Metacity bug tracker. Over a hundred of these are enhancement requests.
During the first quarter of last year, this blog ran a daily “bug of the day” or “squib of the day” feature, where suggested enhancements would be discussed. Every so often, there’d be a roundup post where the fate of the bugs of the previous few weeks was revisited. The idea was that decisions could be made in the open rather than behind closed doors.
That was all very well, and it got the community more involved in discussing new features. However, there were two main problems:
- Enhancement bugs are probably the least important kind of bug, and yet they’re the most interesting to write about. So this plan focused people’s attention on the least important things.
- There’s only a few people who are willing to hack on Metacity, and they only have a certain amount of time available to do it. This plan meant that more time was spent writing blog posts than writing patches.
It might be useful to resurrect this feature, but not unless these two issues were addressed. Perhaps we should extend it to covering all kinds of bugs in order of priority, and instead of having daily posts have a strict rule that nothing new could be posted until the previous bug had been dealt with. Perhaps your chronicler should also delegate writing the posts, if some willing amanuensis could be found.
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