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Bug 333585

Summary: Multiple ideas for Eclipse.org improvements
Product: Community Reporter: Austin Riddle <austin.riddle>
Component: FoE DisbursementsAssignee: Eclipse FOE Disbursements <foe-disbursements-inbox>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: P3 CC: caniszczyk, rsternberg, wayne.beaton
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Windows 7   
Whiteboard:

Description Austin Riddle CLA 2011-01-05 12:02:58 EST 
Hello,

This is not necessarily a request for me to receive money to work on these ideas, but rather to suggest that some of the money go toward the appropriate parties for solutions:

1. There is some great frustration with using anonymous pserver in CVS for building projects because of an approximate 8 hour delay.  This would be a nice project for a student or someone to do, and would be a big help.

2. The Eclipse website could use some modernization. It has an overall *dry* or *static* look to it.  It doesn't seem like it would make new people excited about eclipse or give the impresssion of its professional use.  The Eclipse Con submission system is buggy and doesn't handle apostrophes in the text very well.  So the idea would be some overall cleanup and modernization of the web services/sites that committers and contributors use.  Don't get me wrong, I am appreciative of the work of our current webmasters.

3. The Committer portal is confusing to relatively new committers like myself.  Particularly I would suggest a revamp of the CQ submission process that is more descriptive and enforcing of a workflow.  Something like a *TurboTax* workflow/wizard with questions and explanations of options might me one approach.  The current descriptions and options can lead a new user to erroneous inputs. Also aiding the process as it goes through bugzilla would be helpful. 

Let me share one experience that I had in this regard:

I was a little confused on my first CQ, when the IP rep. said that I needed a PMC to declare a dependency relationship...and I asked myself "and how am I supposed to obtain that?" I didn't realize that I needed to trigger that as a conversation in the dev channel.  Now did I know what to say.  All of that kind of ambiguity makes the process difficult for new people.  The current bugzilla configuration is not adequate for that....we need something that can enforce and describe the workflow better.

Thanks for your consideration.
Comment 1 Ralf Sternberg CLA 2011-01-13 08:47:38 EST 
+1

The CVS synchronization is really annoying. For example, when some bug is fixed, CC'ed users get an immediate e-mail notification but cannot try the fix before the pserver CVS has synchronized - often this does not even happen on the same working day!

There were cases where the pserver CVS delivered content that was two weeks old. The webmasters can usually fix those issues promptly, but inconsistencies like that happen from time to tim, also for the git mirrors: bug 330271, bug 322148, bug 322885, bug 332365, bug 298528.

The source code repository is the heart of an open source project. If they are not reliable, I think available budget should first go into fixing the infrastructure.
Comment 2 Wayne Beaton CLA 2011-01-31 22:18:55 EST 
As much as I hate to do this, I intend to mark this bug as WONTFIX. However, I would like to leave it open for at least one more round of comments before doing so.

I agree that these are all very legitimate issues, but the funds we have available are limited and are intended to fund discrete activities or purchases. Given these constraints, we really need to have specific goals and dollar amounts attached.

If somebody wanted to turn this around and, say, offer to revitalize our website in very specific ways for some sum of money, then we can entertain that possibility. 

Unfortunately, we do not have the resources to seek out resources to accomplish arbitrary tasks. This would be different if the amount of money available were, say, an order of magnitude larger, but given the relatively small amount, it's just not possible at this point.

(In reply to comment #0)
> 1. There is some great frustration with using anonymous pserver in CVS for
> building projects because of an approximate 8 hour delay.  This would be a 
> nice project for a student or someone to do, and would be a big help.

I recommend that you open a bug against Community/CVS. AFAIK, this isn't a resource issue, but rather a decision that was made to reduce the load on our main CVS servers. I may be wrong. It's really something that webmaster has to get involved in though. In any case, it's something that webmaster will have to deal with; if sensible, we can potentially reassign some or all of the available funds to webmaster's budget.
 
> 2. The Eclipse website could use some modernization. It has an overall *dry* 
> or *static* look to it.  It doesn't seem like it would make new people excited
> about eclipse or give the impresssion of its professional use.  The Eclipse 
> Con submission system is buggy and doesn't handle apostrophes in the text very
> well.  So the idea would be some overall cleanup and modernization of the web
> services/sites that committers and contributors use.  Don't get me wrong, I am
> appreciative of the work of our current webmasters.

I agree. The apostrophe issue drives me a little nuts (nevermind special characters). Again, please open a bug against Community/EclipseCon. Unfortunately, good web design requires skill, so this isn't something we can just hire a student to do over a two-week period. We just don't have the kind of money available as part of this fund to pull this off.

> 3. The Committer portal is confusing to relatively new committers like myself. 
> Particularly I would suggest a revamp of the CQ submission process that is 
> more descriptive and enforcing of a workflow.  Something like a *TurboTax*
> workflow/wizard with questions and explanations of options might me one
> approach.  The current descriptions and options can lead a new user to
> erroneous inputs. Also aiding the process as it goes through bugzilla would be
> helpful. 

I have to agree that the portal experience is not as rich as I'd like. We recently did the due diligence on a portal rewrite and decided that it would be *very* expensive and time consuming. We don't have enough money in the FoE fund for this sort of thing. In the meantime, we have been trying to provide incremental fixes to make things better. Please open a bug against Community/Portal with this request and we'll try to tackle it.

(In reply to comment #1)
> The source code repository is the heart of an open source project. If they are
> not reliable, I think available budget should first go into fixing the
> infrastructure.

Agreed. Unfortunately, we don't have enough money in this fund to hire an additional resource for webmaster.

If it is the consensus of the community that these funds should be allocated to the webmaster's budget, I can make a case to EMO(ED) to divert these funds in consideration of hiring another resource. I don't know how that will fit into the overall budget, but we can make a case if that's what everybody wants us to do.
Comment 4 Wayne Beaton CLA 2011-02-01 10:47:00 EST 
Marking as WONTFIX.