[horde] OT: smart questions (was: Re: Latest CVS breaked the IMP login)

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting rogerk at queernet.org:

> I respect your development efforts, Chuck.  Boy howdy, do I.  But...

For some reason, I always know what's coming when I see this. :/

> Spending hours or days on #1 when others on a list may have seen an issue,
> addressed it for themselves, and moved on without telling anyone is a
> colossal waste of time, as is trying to figure out if there is relevant
> information in 250,000 matches to a web search.

1. You don't have to do a web search, the list archives are available and 
the MARC search engine is pretty good.

2. I'll come back to this later, but it also doesn't justify simply dumping 
a problem in someone else's hands and basically insisting that a developer 
stop developing - or documenting - to try and figure out what someone is 
talking about.

> And as for #6, if open source software is going to be useful to the 
> masses, the whole "intelligence test" thing has got to go.  "The source 
> is the documentation" has to be replaced with "it's not checked in till 
> it's tested and documented -- man pages (pod, whatever) is part of the 
> code."  If that part is done -- and "I don't do documentation" only 
> means "I don't write the pretty, task-oriented end-user documentation" -- 
> then #2 can make sense.  Until then, it's just Geex4Geex.

If you are talking about release software, then I agree. But since we are 
talking about CVS HEAD, I don't buy it. HEAD is going to break sometimes, 
and I refuse to consider that a bad thing - if I can't get something in to 
HEAD to get feedback on it and to get other eyes on it, that pretty much 
eliminates the value to me of the Horde developers as a community.

This isn't commercial software, by which I really mean that by and large, 
pretty much all of us do this because we want to. "Us" is a pretty small 
number, too. This isn't being done to conquer the world or to be "useful to 
the masses" - _especially_ not HEAD. It's done because we need it or enjoy 
it or because we started it a long time ago and it's crazily ruled our 
lives ever since.

I obviously am pretty invested in Horde overall, so it's hard for me to 
seperate out my feelings on how I wish the community worked, the fact that 
I really _do_ want it to be a community, and my feelings on software 
development. It's a complicated, personal mess. But, IMHO:

1. This is a community. You owe it to the community to try and make the 
community better if you want to participate in it. Part of that is doing a 
baseline level of work on your questions so that the person looking into 
the problem report at least has enough information to go on.

2. HEAD is a development branch; as such, it is primarily for developers. 
We don't restrict anyone from using it, but people who do use it have to be 
willing to troubleshoot their own problems more than people using release 
versions.

3. Yes, our documentation sucks. I wish it were better. But it's better now 
than it's ever been, so we're moving in the right direction. I'm lucky 
enough to have some clients that pay me to do Horde work. I'd love to be 
paid to document it. But, no one is offering that, and I have to pay bills 
like anyone.

> As for the "arrogance" point on that page: whether a checkin "breaked"
> the IMP login for everyone, or just for him, it did change something, and 
> the observable behavior is that what worked before doesn't work.  If he 
> made no changes to the setup other than updating and something stopped 
> working, the checkin *did* break IMP login on his system.  That doesn't 
> mean it was bad or wrong.

I've gone back to the archives to make sure I'm not completely off my 
rocker, and I still don't see anything in that email that gives me 
something to go on - IMAP server log entries, some indication of when they 
updated, _something_. Given that my installation is up to date and working 
as best I can tell (aside from what I have currently broken and am working 
on, and a few known issues), a pointer to some question-asking 
documentation seemed better than a bare "give us more info".

-chuck

--
Charles Hagenbuch, <chuck at horde.org>
"After a few minutes the most aromatic and nice smelling Italian coffee 
 will come out of the exhaustpipe." - Our stove-top espresso pot