RANT: treatment of submitted patches by the development team.

[skogan]

Hello.

<rant>
I've decided to take a look at the current 1.4 development version today, and discovered a very interesting thing: the changelog has almost no mention of external contributions, while the source code shows some of the said patches applied to the code.

Personally, I don't expect any kind of mention of my name next to my (very humble) contributions - however, I WOULD like to be made aware if the bugs get patched in the code or not - this will save me (and other people as well) a lot of trouble when the new version comes out.

Also, it would be nice to see one of the devs react to EVERY patch submitted. No need for lengthy discussions, just a simple "yes or no" message.

There aren't that many patches submitted, it's not such a big work.

I understand that you have a business to run, and that you have to put your paying customers in front of the nonpaying ones (as well as save face), but THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO RUN A PROJECT!
</rant>

[Alexei]

Please search for "Thanks to" in the ChangeLog. Also, if you think we missed something or forgot to name a contributor, just let us know and this will be fixed shortly.

[skogan]

Again, it's not about the naming or thanking - it's about specifying changes.

as for specific patches - for example, this patch made it into the new code:

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9037

What about my request for responces to every submitted patch?

[Alexei]

Again, it's not about the naming or thanking - it's about specifying changes.

as for specific patches - for example, this patch made it into the new code:

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9037

What about my request for responces to every submitted patch?

Not everything is included into the ChangeLog. No separate task is created in the bug tracking system for small or trivial changes or typos.

All patches are reviewed by ZABBIX team. If we decide to include a patch into ZABBIX, we say about this. Please do not expect immediate response.

[skogan]

Alexei, I don't really understand your policy. There are a lot of bug fixes here in this forum and you (seemingly) ignore most of them. The fact that you, yourself, didn't encounter a particular problem or consider it unimportant doesn't mean that you have to ignore people's reports. And people submit actual, working patches here - ignoring that is just plain weird.

I know my bugfixes best, so I'll talk about them:

Here is something I originally submitted for 1.4.2:

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8429

It fixes a real, specific problem that I have encountered with Redhat EL3. Sure, it's an old distro, but there are plenty of people still using it. You don't want processes counted correctly on such systems?

or this:

http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8668

Yes, not many people use multiple different severity triggers with the same name - but this feature is actually advertised as far as I recall - the fact that the overview screen displays a completely incorrect picture in these setups doesn't concern you? And this case is even more weird, because TWO people, independently, submitted a fix for that, and it is still ignored.

Zabbix 1.4 is a PRODUCTION version - people RELY on it. How can you ignore bug reports? And we're not even talking reports but fixes - 90% of the work is already done for you: just verify that the problem is real, review the code and merge it in. How easy is that?

Just to be fair: I very much like your product, and I believe you're doing a great job. But these small things really spoil the barrel of honey, if you understand what I mean.