On Fri, 2013-03-22 at 12:42 -0700, Joe Wulf wrote:
Adam,
Wondering, as an organizational issue, if bugzappers has died out because it is just too painful a 'job' to keep up with. Sure people would come with high energy in the beginning, but their enthusiasm wanes when the rewards don't keep up with the level of effort to accomplish it diligently and ever-so-successfully. So many, I am sure, have other interests, and life in general can just get in the way of hobbyists. Your suggestion about having a person who's JOB it is to accomplish triaging, might really be the right course of action. They'll be paid to stick around and invest themselves in making Fedora better.
As Bill said, RH has paid people to triage in the past (mcepl comes to mind), and we may want to do so again. So far as the volunteer side goes, your theory may well be correct; it's actually quite hard to tell. One of the issues with triaging is that it's less of a communal thing than you might initially imagine: you tend to wind up with a group of people doing entirely separate work. If I'm triaging X bugs, and you're triaging Firefox bugs, and Anna, Bob and Charlotte are all triaging other components, we don't actually have much to talk to each other about. So you don't get that catalyst of discussion that other groups get, people just wind up ploughing their solitary fields. We often had weekly meetings where we'd talk about the white elephant project of producing some stats on triage (another thing that never quite got done) and then...just leave, because there wasn't really anything else to say.
If you managed to hit some kind of critical mass where you could have five people working on some components, at least each group of five people could talk to each other. But we never got there.