Re: GOP pre-planning: Frog bugfixing

[Valentin Villenave]

2008/12/11 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:

> New features are way sexier than bug fixes.

Yes. And you know I like people to be happy :)

> Earth to Valentin: there's approximately half a dozen people in
> the world for whom it's remotely economically feasible to work on
> bounties, and they're perfectly capable of looking in google code.

If by "feasible" you mean full-time work, no it isn't. If by
"feasible" you mean "do what you usually do for a hobby, and get a few
bucks as a sign of gratitude", yes it definitely is.

> Let's take the relative \includes.  My initial guess was that it'd
> be 2 or 3 hours, but Carl said it'd be longer than that.  And Carl
> is one of the best "non-core" developers.  Let's say it takes him
> 10 hours all told -- 5 hours to understand what to do, 1 hour to
> write the 20 lines of code (in total) that this feature would
> require, 1 hour to test+debug, 1 hour to modify docs+write
> regtest, and a total of 2 hours to send emails, upload the patch
> to the online patch viewer thingie, etc.

I'm considering this from the other side: eventually, *someone* is
gonna do that (if in ten years from now nobody has, I'll do it
myself). If this someone can be offered something merely symbolic, or
even a little more, perhaps it will be done a little sooner.

> Making a fancy display of requested features and bounty amounts is
> *not worth it*.  Getting familiar with the lilypond source code
> takes a long time.  By the way, I'm including $10/hr as "remotely
> economically feasible".  My guess is that if people like Carl and
> Neil were to start chasing bounties, they'd be lucky to get an
> hourly return of $10/hr.

Perhaps it could work the other way around, too: someone could say
"I'll implement this feature if I can get $CASH_AMOUNT ". Then the
fancy display would look like a Wikipedia fundraising campaign, with a
progress bar waiting to get filled.

(I know Han-Wen has tried to do that in the past, but since our user
base is constantly growing and getting more enthusiastic I still do
think this is worth a shot, particularly if we're dealing with devs
who already have a paid job somewhere.)

> Don't get me wrong; bounties are a nice idea of a bonus for
> current developers.  But they basically require existing
> development knowledge.  Your market is a tiny set of individuals,
> not the faceless masses that contribute (hah!) to LSR or the wiki.

Never underestimate the number of geeks who are likely to stop by and
get tempted. We see some twice a week on the lists.

Cheers,
Valentin.