zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

For those that are trying to communicate with me about the Zim project: I
might not be able to get back to you right away, in fact many bug reports
sit idle for months before I'm able to look at them and respond. This is
not because I don't care, but because my time is very limited. I have a
full time job that does not allow me working on Zim during office hours and
I have young kids to take care of outside of office hours. This forces me
to prioritize what time I spent on Zim. Typically I ignore all incoming
reports while I'm working on new features and then after a few months I go
through the bulk that has built up in one go. So let me apologize up front
if your email or bug report goes unanswered for a long time - it's the
best I can do for now.

Please realize this project is a volunteer driven effort. Although there
are many contributors, in the end the project relies on my personal
availability to do integration of features and general support. My free
time is limited, and in the current situation this dictates the pace. To
get things moving and be more responsive it would be great to get help with
things like:

   - Bug assessment and triage: I believe a significant part of new bug
   reports are either duplicates or help requests. These could quickly be
   answered by experienced users who have a bit of overview over the issue
   list. Reducing the inflow will help to identify the real urgent issues and
   respond to those.
   - Simple, clean cut merge requests for accepted bugs & test suite
   improvements: There are a number of issues in the list tagged as "good
   first issue" that are potential candidates. If the fix is local in the code
   and covered by a test, I can pull the merge request without additional work
   on my side.
   - Creating a new window installer: This has been supported for many
   years by a volunteer who decided to step down as of Zim 0.70. Therefore the
   windows installer is no longer updated and this brings another task to my
   desk - unless anyone else picks it up.


If you would like to help on any of the above items and take over some of
the project work, feel free to contact me directly and I will help to get
you started.

I would also like to mention a couple of things that -- although very much
appreciated -- do not necessarily help to move faster:

   - Monetary donations: Since I'm fulltime employed otherwise, donations
   do not help me to free up more time. In the past I have tried using
   donations to put "bounties" on wanted features, but this failed to attract
   any substantial submissions.
   - Hacking away on big new features: Typically big new features require
   big changes in the framework to be integrated and require a lot of changes
   in test cases to verify that nothing else breaks. Unless you are willing to
   take this along and make sure to align on the framework architecture
   changes upfront, the merge request will likely be pending for a long time,
   waiting for me to review, rework and integrate it.


Kind regards,

Jaap