Bug fixes

Is the ‘info’ email address on the contacts page the right one to send bug fixes to? Seems a bit of a black hole for me at the moment.

Hmmm. Looks like I’ve found another black hole. Maybe I should add a link to the excellent tumbleweed photo.

Must be Nobel prize winning – 2 black holes in a week

The code@… email address should work. But it seem ROOL has much much much more code received then people to handle it.

Thanks.

I realise that – and it’s likely to only get worse for them. It would be nice if they had an automated reply – something along the lines of ‘Thank you for you submission, given our work load there is little chance that it will be looked at in my lifetime. Don’t expect to hear from us’ At least then I’d know that their machine had read it before junking it. :-)

I realise that – and it’s likely to only get worse for them.

It’s a question of scale. If, say, there are 100 people actively engaged in ROOL activities and (randomly) each one has a question once a month, then that’s around 4 emails a day for ROOL to deal with which is probably quite manageable (maybe 3 of them are simple yes/no questions and 1 of them takes an hour to handle).

As noted the other day there are 2000+ accounts, and I recall Theo saying over 5000+ torrent downloads from the Raspberry Pi foundation. That means 200+ emails a day!

There’s a transition state between not many people engaged and handling everything in spare time (remember the ROOL folks have day jobs too) and having enough users to make enough money to pay for full time staff. I’m not sure what’s needed to get to the latter state.

The code@ email address should work.

But fundamentally that goes to the same overworked audience (doubly so if you sent it to info@ as well!). If this is referring to DeviceFS fixes, perhaps posting the patch to the code review forum might help? If it’s low risk and less than 30 lines of change someone else can potentially commit it.

I am curious. Did you just mean to imply that there are now so many people voluntarily maintaining the RISC OS codebase and submitting patches and bugfixes that the admin staff have become overworked just dealing with it all?

Haven’t we been waiting and wishing for exactly this situation for, like, six years?

Did you just mean to imply that there are now so many people voluntarily maintaining the RISC OS codebase and submitting patches and bugfixes that the admin staff have become overworked just dealing with it all?

I’ve no idea what the spread of types of things sent in is. I doubt there are 200+ patches per day, but I could imagine 199 trivial enquiries and 1 patch – but those 199 sap all the time. The term “admin staff” is very grand, ROOl has zero staff, it’s all Ben/Steve/Andrew’s blood/sweat/tears.

Even just saying “It would be nice if they had an automated reply” would mean someone has to set that up, but that takes time too!

I try to err on the side of not emailing ROOL unless I really have to, having exhausted Google, and the forums here first.

I responded on 4th March 2013 to a request from ROOL for help (offering help regarding news posts) but they have been too busy to reply. It is now ten weeks further on…

Even just saying “It would be nice if they had an automated reply” would mean someone has to set that up, but that takes time too!

Believe it or not – we actually had a planning call last night and this finally made it onto the agenda. Our plan (which may take some time to implement, as usual) is to set up an auto-responder on the info@ address which gives various bits of useful info and lets you know that we did at least get the email!

The sorts of thing I’m thinking of putting in the reply are:

1. A brief set of sorry excuses for why we’re slow to respond
2. A hint that the code@, ctools@ and allocate@ addresses exist and what they are for
3. A pointer to the forums (we get asked an awful lot of questions that’d be better to ask on the forums so others can benefit from the answers)
4. A pointer to the wiki pages, downloads and other useful stuff

Any other suggestions? Don’t suggest that we give a time limit within which we’ll respond or I’ll put 12 months in (and yes, I’m sure there are some emails I’ve missed that are older than that… doh).

Note: the auto-responder will only respond to emails that are to “info@” (rather than cc-ing it) and don’t start with “re:”. It’ll probably also be set up not to auto-respond to the same recipient more than once in any given day.

A brief set of sorry excuses for why we’re slow to respond

The first of these ought to be the amount of time it takes to think up varied, innovative and above all convincing excuses that are to be included in auto-responder messages.

Agreed. It’s important that we spend a lot of time thinking about new ways to explain why we’re not spending a lot of time doing anything else.

It’s important that we spend a lot of time thinking about new ways to explain why we’re not spending a lot of time doing anything else.

Awesome. You’ve been promoted to Management. Well done!

Awesome. You’ve been promoted to Management. Well done!

https://www.google.co.uk/#q=drunken+lemurs
october 26, 2007

Not that ROOL fit, but it is a favourite

It’s important that we spend a lot of time thinking about new ways to explain why we’re not spending a lot of time doing anything else.

<sniffs the air>

Do I smell trademark infringement here? ;)