În dum., 17 mar. 2019 la 23:22, Gergo Tisza <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org> a scris:
On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 8:23 AM Strainu
<strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:
A large backlog by itself is not alarming. A
growing one for
components deployed to WMF sites is. It indicates insufficient
attention is given to ongoing maintenance of projects after they are
no longer "actively developed", which in turn creates resentment with
the reporters.
It really doesn't. The backlog is the contact surface between stuff that
exists and stuff that doesn't; all the things we don't have but which seem
realistically within reach. As functionality expands, that surface expands
too. It is a normal process.
Except functionality doesn't expand for not actively developed
products, but the backlog does.
(We do have projects which are basically unmaintained.
Those are not
typically the ones producing lots of new tasks though, since most relevant
issues have been filed already. And realistically the choice is between
having poorly maintained components and having far less components. Would
undeploying UploadWizard, for example, reduce resentment? I don't think so.)
It's all relative: if UW would be undeployed in favor of a different
component that would cover some of the stuff lacking from UW, than I
don't think we'd see much resentment. I would personally love to see
regular code stewardship reviews for every deployed components which
haven't had one in 2-3 years. After a couple of such iterations, I'm
pretty sure we'd have a non-negligible number of extensions
undeployed. Would that lead to resentment? Sure, but I don't think the
level would be comparable. The main problem I see is there is no good
way to decide how important something is beyond usage metrics.