Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> I think we have hit a stage where effectively no work is being done on
> exim - the bugzilla queue is increasing, but very few of them are
> being touched at all.
I have a feeling Philip left behind a sort of leadership vacuum. At
least that what it feels like to me as an outsider. It's not apparent to
me who's "in charge" any more, which makes it more difficult to
contribute. Two suggestions that shouldn't be to much trouble is;
Suggestion 1: Set up public (read only) CVS/SVN to make it easier to
track ongoing development (not that there's much of that going on right
now).
Suggestion 2: Publish a list of people with commit access, along with
what areas of Exim the commiters feel comfortable with.
I haven't really been paying such close attention lately, but It's my
understanding that most new entries in Bugzilla are feature requests. A
fair chunk of the rest are user errors, not bugs in Exim. I think if the
community could organise some short of "triage" team to verify and
prioritise bugs, it shouldn't be to difficult to find people willing to
work on them. Personally I'd be terrible at such a job, but enough of my
salary if brought in from Exim related activities for me to justify
spending time on *fixing* verified bugs. So;
Suggestion 3: Organise triage team tasked with maintaining a prioritised
list of verified bugs.
That leaves the "wish-list" bugs. To be honest I don't really care to
much about those. Exim is already an extremely useful tool to a great
number of people, and I'm sad to say that the attitude of people making
requests over the past few years has gone from bad to worse. Maybe it'd
be possible to organise some sort of reverse auction / fund raiser for
requesters to pledge funding for developing the requested features. If
not, I'd be happy to "scratch my own itches" and contribute code that
solves *my* issues. I have a feeling that's how most of Exim came about
anyway...
Bob
