On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 12:36 PM, Bardur Arantsson
On 25-02-2015 19:21, lennart spitzner wrote:
I am not convinced. how does closing ~40 out of ~700 open tickets make the contributors more effective? that demand exceeds resources is true, but it is no argument for closing issues. many of the issues represent sensible ideas for features that do not need new feedback.
Well, it's a *start* at reducing the ridiculous number of outdated issues. Nobody is served by having huge numbers of outdated issues in an issue tracker. It's demotivating and the likelihood of an issue being fixed (or implemented, or...) decreases exponentially the longer it's been in a tracker... which is usually fair enough since it must mean that it's not *that* important after all.
I'd say the general lack of stability and the recently mentioned lack of tests are the main problems of Cabal; to a degree this looks like shooting at symptoms.
That may certainly be the case. You should feel to contribute fixes for any of the existing issues -- that would help the Cabal maintainer(s) enormously, I suspect.
On a related note, I'm tagging issues with 'documentation' or 'easy' as I find them. Either should be do-able for a first-time contributor. In particular, the 'easy' issues are ones I think I could talk a Haskell programmer through in a 1-2 paragraphs; something I think a first-time contributor could knock out in an afternoon. Periodically, folks ask about small projects for advanced students. I know Cabal's not hip and exciting, or whatever, but please think of us. -- Thomas Tuegel