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sm-grimoire - Re: [SM-Grimoire] Guru tasks

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Subject: Discussion of Spells and Grimoire items

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  • From: Hamish Greig <hgreig AT bigpond.net.au>
  • To: sm-grimoire AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Grimoire] Guru tasks
  • Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 18:02:22 +1100

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I hold no position in the SMGL ranks, officially I am just that overly pushy,
opinionated games guru. But I feel entitled to make some comments considering
the amount of work I do and the help I have given many in their sections.
At the moment (and for some time now), a minority of gurus are doing a
majority of the work, I don't need to point fingers or name names.
$(p4 users) shows 40 developers and of those forty only ~15 have made more
than one submission in the last two months. Yet nearly everyone has accessed
p4 in the last week, which means a lot of gurus have time to enjoy the latest
software and bugfixes but no time to even spend 10 minutes and close a
QUICKFIX bug found by prometheus or already reported by some user. This is
extremely disheartening.

Those who are active can be proud of their efforts, and I honestly thank you.

For the guru's remaining inactive, I have several comments.

a) Bugs don't fix them selves (normally), but once fixed properly they hardly
ever return. Whereas a poorly written spell will continue to be plagued by
problems with each and every update.
b) If you are too busy in real life to do any work I understand. If you have
no life and are just too lazy to fix bugs then wake up to yourself, users
aren't interested in trying out SMGL just to find a whole lot of niggly bugs,
and without new users we have no new developers. Think about it, the better
we get, the more people will want to be involved and the less work any single
person will have to do.
c) It doesn't matter who last worked on the spell, or who's section it is in.
If a bug is still open after a week and the files aren't opened in p4 then it
is fair game. If a bug is still open after a month or more, that doesn't mean
no-one is using the spell, it means no new users can use it. There is a
difference. Providing new users with the largest variety of software to
choose from is the best way for us to expand our userbase.
d) unfortunately bugs really are more important than updates and new spells.
Don't get confused though, upgrading a version while checking a bug and
fixing it is perfectly acceptable. New spells shouldn't have to be frozen
out, this is meant to be fun for us, but some common sense should prevail,
fix a bug and add a spell, don't just keep adding spells with no thought for
long term grimoire stability and usability.

This has been bothering me for some time, so I hope you all took the time to
read it.
To those actively working on bugs and SMGL I salute you.
For those others resting on past laurels or just plain freeloading ? I can't
think of anything nice to say ...

Hamish

On Thu, 4 Dec 2003 12:47, Eric Sandall wrote:
> Hello all Gurus,
>
> I'd just like to let you know that I'd like everyone to focus less on
> version updates (at least for the time being) and more on fixing bugs. I'll
> be running around doing small/easy version updates when I get e-mails about
> them as I expect the gurus to be fixing bugs (especially show stoppers) in
> their sections before adding the newest whizbang version that just came
> out.
>
> Not to say that you can't do version updates, but I'd rather see more bug
> fixes going in (which I don't see much of, except recently again).
>
> -sandalle
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