[ros-users] Uservoice-like Suggestions Page

[Alex Bravo]

> Maybe we could make a campaign to get more packages onto repo hosting
that have merge/pull request capabilities?
+1 to that. We need to let ROS developers know about this.

Alex Bravo

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Jonathan Bohren
<jonathan.bohren at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 10:07 PM, Ken Conley <kwc at kwc.org> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 12:49 PM, Jonathan Bohren
>> <jonathan.bohren at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Jul 19, 2012 9:11 PM, "Ken Conley" <kwc at kwc.org> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> If you want to request a feature, it really should be in a ticket
>> >> tracker -- or, even better, a patch should be attached.
>> >
>> > Considering the small size of many of the ros package development teams,
>> > most of the time I submit tickets, bugfixes, feature requests to issue
>> > trackers of projects, it feels like they're going into a black hole.
>>
>> This was something that KForge (new infrastructure) exacerbated, but
>> was then meant to help with, but like most infrastructure, takes a lot
>> of love, attention, and care to bring about the final vision -- just
>> to hammer in my point that more infrastructure is not a good thing,
>> IMHO.
>>
>
> It's definitely a hard problem, but I feel like we need to do something
> before things get too broken to fix.
>
>
>> For the issue of patches, my life
>> became a lot easier with stacks hosted on GitHub, where the cognitive
>> load of integrating patches is very low.  For stacks not on GitHub,
>> patches come in all different sorts of formats and take a huge amount
>> of time to test and integrate -- most patches do not come with tests,
>> and I'd estimate the defect rate in patches I've seen at 30-50%.
>>
>
> Yeah, the few cases where I've had good experiences have been through
> repos hosted on sites where I could fork, patch, and then submit a
> merge/pull request.
>
>
>> So, this is a long way of saying that moving more stacks to GitHub is
>> likely to improve the uptake of patches, though exacerbate the issue
>> of issue trackers.
>
>
> Maybe we could make a campaign to get more packages onto repo hosting that
> have merge/pull request capabilities?
>
>
>> Adding a 'lazy-web' version of feature requests
>> seems to only compound the issue.
>>
>
> Yeah, I don't think uservoice is a good solution, I sort of want the
> reverse, where people can more easily submit features, instead of feature
> requests. I think the feature-request pattern will only work if the
> community is supplying the feature-responses. This is why I initially asked
> if we could use answers.ros.org. I'm not going to delude myself by saying
> that I think the maintainers of ROS packages who are also doing research
> have the time to do the bidding of everyone using their software. I think
> the pattern should involve users of a package contributing fixes and
> features back. There are two things that I think set us apart from the
> majority of open source software projects:
>
> 1) Each independent unit is only maintained by a few people, but is made
> to inter-operate with code written by thousands of others, so you have very
> small development teams
> 2) At this point at least, people using ROS packages are all also
> developers writing ROS packages, even if they're not publishing that code,
> and they actually have the capability to fix bugs in or add features to the
> small packages they depend on.
>
> I think there needs to be more pushing contributions back to those
> packages listed in your project's <depend> tags. I just wish there were a
> better way to facilitate it.
>
>  --
> Jonathan Bohren
> PhD Student
> Dynamical Systems and Control Laboratory
> Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics
> The Johns Hopkins University
>
> (707) 520-4736
> jbo at jhu.edu
>
>
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>
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