[Psi-devel] Re: jabber news

[Remko Troncon]

> Lots of stuff going on...

Okay, this is not a personal rant, but i'm starting to get quite fed up
with all these visions on why Jabber sucks, how the future of Jabber
should be, how great you think your ideas are but how it's everyone
else's fault that Jabber didn't conquer the world. I think all of the
developers _know_ what is wrong, and _know_ what useful things have
to be done, but they just don't get around to doing it (standards
progressed faster than people could implement it).  Writing these
obvious things in visions of pages long might feel good for the
writer to say what's on his mind, but it doesn't help the whole
situation at all. All this time ranting and reading rants (although
i personally don't read them anymore) could have been invested in
more useful Jabber programming.  Programming Jabber is for the most
of us a hobby, and should be fun. Having people criticizing Jabber
all the time takes a lot of fun out of it, puts a lot of pressure on
developers, and will probably stop Jabber more than help it
progress.

And i realise that main jabber developers stepped down this year, and
that it's a very sad story, but to be frank: the world doesn't revolve around
those few persons. There are a lot of smaller developers and contributors
which do a lot of good programming, and saying that jabber has no future
without these big developers is like saying all these smaller developers
do useless work. Moreover, i think that, for a healthy project with
a reasonable amount of developers, the lead developer stepping down from
his own creation can be a good thing too, as it will bring new wind to a
project, and probably less "i don't like other people to touch my code
so i don't accept your patches".

What about Psi ? Personally, i think Psi is at least one dev short. I
submitted bugfix patches of 1 line long a week after test1, and it took
3 weeks to get them committed. Now don't get me wrong: i'm convinced
that at least 1 developer should review (every?) patch, and i know that
developers have more important stuff to do. But it would be a lot more
motivating to people if there's at least 1 developer at all time to
review a patch, such that you don't have to wait ages for any of your
changes to apply.
Also, we should do regularly do an active search for contributions on the
forums, to let people know we welcome any help. And, of course, we
should do our best to give at least some feedback on the patches in a
short time, to keep people motivated.

cheers,
Remko

PS: I realise the irony of a long rant on long rants :-)