[TYPO3-UG US] ... from New York

[Dimitri Tarassenko]

John,

> I'm not trying to piss anyone off Olivier.  I'm stating facts... the
> oh-so-popular "it's open source, stop whining and do it yourself" crap
> isn't what anyone is looking for when they post a question... we know
> it's open source... we know it's based on user contribution... holy cow
> we know!  but if a user contributes "Hey ya spelled it wrong" 3 months
> ago, then it's updated without that being taken into consideration,
> leaving the spelling error... well I'll let you decide for yourself how
> that makes the user feel and how it makes the upper echelon of Typo3 look.

I've had conversations on this topic in the dev list quite a while
ago, and it's been time and again that it was said by me and many
others that Typo3 needs an anonymous bug submittal and central bug
tracking (vs. comments in extensions doc). The "single login" concept
where you would have the same username and password for TER, typo3 and
mantis has been discussed at least 3 times on my memory and I am still
unsure if it has ever been implemented.

I basically gave up, at this point. I am maintaining my set of patches
and fixes for this and that because building a better CMS is not my
business - I earn money by providing better service USING the CMS. If
the CMS can benefit from it - fine. If it doesn't want to - I may feel
rejected and all but I still am on the winning side of the deal, it's
just not the win-win situation anymore.

I did the RPMs out of very selfish reason, since _everything_ that we
deploy in production is RPM based, and if there are no RPMs we make
them. Same story with patches and everything - some of it gets
incorporated if I get to talk to Michael Stucki before the release,
some stuff doesn't, for various reasons starting from people dropping
the ball ending with politics and stuff.

Let's face it, Typo3 is somewhat closed development community where
it's hard to get your changes merged into the mainstream and
impossible to get them backported. Not because the main developers are
lazy or anything, it's because the whole submittal and change
management process is intransparent, bulky and either not well
organized, not well explained or inconvenient to the developers who
only _occasionally_ contribute something (like myself).

Well, I don't know. Maybe let's merge all our patches together and
create a megapatch? Build a separate bugtracker dedicated to broken
English, U.S./Canada/NorthAm localization and extensions, something.

Because if you hope Typo3 is going to move the open and public
bugtracker like SourceForge - it's not going to happen, just as
feature/fix backporting, support for installed base of older versions,
streamlining/building the knowledge base and better user documentation
are not going to happen.

Frankly, I think the project has outgrown the management abilities of
whoever is in charge, and the larger the number of your installations,
the older the versions are that you are running, the more you suffer.

I had some hopes with TYPO3 Association. Of course, it turned out
voting on mascots and picking a shade of orange for new TYPO3 logo are
much more entertaining and important tasks;)

Gee, just looked back - it's a pretty long email... ;)

> Oh! have I mentioned recently that Typo3 is, by far, the best O/S CMS
> I've come across?

I'll second your opinion on that, too.;))

--
Dimitri Tarassenko