[Bitcoin-development] Seeking advice: Encouraging bug-fixing over new features

[John Smith]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 11:07 PM, Matt Corallo <bitcoin-list at bluematt.me>wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 08:45 +1000, Gavin Andresen wrote:
> > "A couple of bitcoins to fix a bug" sounds to me like nothing but
> > trouble for whoever is in charge of awarding the bounties, but maybe
> > I'm just anti-bounty because spending 2 or 3 hours and getting $30
> > worth of bitcoins for fixing a bug wouldn't motivate me.
>
> I do think it would motivate some people to fix a bug or two, though I
> would say it wouldn't encourage long-term contributors, just a bunch of
> hacked together patches which "fix" a bug.
>

Which, in many cases, is enough. Many times, fixing a bug is a few hours of
debugging, then fixing three lines of codes.

Sometimes it just takes a monkey to sit behind a PC and bash on it frantic
enough (with a debugger) to find and fix bugs :-) Competition to fix bugs is
(up to a certain level) good, it gets people off their ass. But I think the
competition problem is very hypothetical. It assumes there will suddenly be
*a lot* of people that want to fix the same bug. That's unrealistic...

Writing a few test-cases (which is better than the 0 we have now) also won't
take a Linus-level developer to work on it full time. A reasonable dev just
needs to put some time into it.

That leaves the more difficult work to the lead devs.

For a distributed currency I must say there is very little belief here in a
distributed process. Yes, you can also start a company and hire people to
work on it full time, but then they'll be working on helping customer not
solving bugs of the issue tracker (which might have an overlap, but not
necessarily). And it also isn't clear whether changes are contributed back
to the project.

You should not underestimate the open source community. There's a lot of
smart students eager to work on interesting, high-impact projects. Bitcoin
certainly fits that description, but the problem is that Bitcoin isn't
really that known yet with devs, and they need a little push to get
involved. And to work on the current code-base, because usually they will
look at the code and decide it's a piece of crap and want to rewrite it (new
people syndrome).

Yes, there might be one-time-and-run-off flakes, but hey that's life... you
only need to gain a few (semi)dedicated devs from it anyway, not recruit an
army of loyal minions.

I'm not saying this push has to be bounties. It could be a nice page, for
example just posting the bounties on the forum is a start, but certainly not
enough. They just get buried in troll poop, and a lot of the forum users are
... *psychological analysis removed*. You really want to reach out somehow.

It should at least have a nice page that attracts people on the
bitcoin.orgsite, and explains why you should work on Bitcoin (because
the project is so
awesome and fun) and some form of attribution (not just a mention in the
gitlog, but bounties is only one option) if you do manage to fix a bug.

Heck a scoreboard with "number of bugs squished" could be a start :-) We
need to be creative here...

JS
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