Mailing List Archive

[Wikimedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Reflecting on my listening tour
I agree with much of what Amir has said here, except one little bit...

On Mon, 17 Apr 2023 at 20:52, Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup@gmail.com> wrote:

> And even if a software would have an owner, it used to be that the team
> was under so much pressure to produce new things instead of maintenance
> that the software would practically be without a maintainer (or worse, as
> even volunteers couldn't unofficially take the role). I can example a few.
>

I think pressure on a team to deliver new things is *one* reason why this
situation has come about, but it's far from being the only one. Here's a
few others off the top of my head:

- Owning so many things that even if there was zero pressure to deliver
new features, the team still couldn't maintain everything that they own.
- Incredibly powerful and incredibly complex features that teams are
afraid of touching lest they break them and make community members angry.
- Conservatism and fear of community outrage causing reluctance to
deprecate functionality.
- Lack of understanding of the impact of the feature.
- Lack of a clear roadmap (a list of bug reports and feature requests is
not a roadmap).

There's more but those are some that come to the top of my head. And, not
everyone one of those always applies to every situation, e.g. I definitely
don't think all of the items in your list should be deprecated!

This causes the path of least resistance to be, for everyone involved, to
leave things in limbo and hope for the best.

Dan