Shlomi Fish (shlomif@xxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > On Tuesday 20 March 2007, Simon Budig wrote: > > Shlomi Fish (shlomif@xxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > > It took me 10 minutes to write. > > > > Oh wow. Is it just me or is this really a *lot* of time? Personally I'd > > consider answering 6 "lazy questions" per hour a waste of time. > > Well, a few notes: > > 1. I didn't measure how much time it took me exactly. It was probably less > than 10 minutes. Something like 5 or 7 minutes. Hard for me to tell. Ok, granted. I was just surprised that you'd seem to take this as something not noteworthy. > 2. I had to find a URL which more experienced developers would know by heart. That is a misconception. I personally do know exactly one URL of the website by heart: "http://www.gimp.org/";, ok, two: "http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/";. Everything else is opening it in the browser and search for the appropriate link (which in this case is prominently in the menu structure). I do believe that this is the same for all developers not actively working with the site itself. > 3. 10 minutes is much less time consuming that writing a bug-fix or an > enhancement patch for the GIMP or for any other program. If it takes me 10 > minutes to answer someone in a polite, friendly and encouraging way and he or > she later become an active developer, then I may have "wasted" 10 minutes, > but subsequently got hours and days of voluntary development in return. > > Which alternative is better? You decide. Well, if it were fun to answer these kind of obvious questions that two minutes researching on the gimp homepage would have solved then you'd have a real point. It is not fun though. To the contrary. And frankly, we put a lot of effort into the source package to make it as easy to compile as possible. I firmly believe that the quality of GIMPs code is a lot better than that of a lot of other free software projects, mostly because especially Mitch and Sven have very strict guidelines for patches. Then somebody comes and asks if Gimp is written in C/C++? I mean, come on. That is like asking "I want to become a computer scientist. How does a computer work?". It is just a painful question. > (I'm not saying any people who is friendly will become so, but the fact is > we've deterred a great deal of potential contributors due to such behaviour.) There are some easy things we can do to improve the communication with other people, no doubt about this. [further good points snipped] Bye, Simon -- simon@xxxxxxxx http://simon.budig.de/ _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
