Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.We use Rules all of the time in our sites. It's really become a very important module for us and also for 191k other sites out there which uses it to extend what their Drupal site can do. You didn't put out a release all that long ago and the documentation looks above par and I like your issue submission guidelines.
But there is a resource problem where there are 4 pages of open D7 bugs in Rules Core alone. This isn't to say that the maintainers aren't doing a great job. This is very hard work and it's work that isn't at all rewarding. Even when others create patches for things that need review & mark them RTBC (only 2), it needs to be carefully vetted to see that it doesn't break a whole bunch of sites when upgrades are applied.
I do think that there should be incentives to ensure that people who are contributing to it are recognized. There should be some motivation to go through the issue queue and see that reports that people have made are acknowledged, repeatable, fixable and eventually closed. This is a lot of work, but there should be some acknowledgement done for those who are tending the issue queue, but I don't think that's enough.
I've blogged about the use of Flattr & Gittip. The latter brought up some great discussions about initiatives like Top Shelf Modules and DrupalFund.us.
Adoption of any of those platforms seems to be pretty slow though. Gittip has the greatest acceptance on d.o because there is at least a form on each users Profile page to add it in, and yet, there has been marginal increase in the adoption or donation rates https://www.gittip.com/for/drupal/
I tried to highlight how Gittip could be incorporated into d.o's issue queue in order to provide incentives to individual contributors. From feedback there, I decided to look at how Corporate logos could be incorporated into the issue queues (even for anonymous users).
None of these solutions is without it's problems. Some of these solutions will work better to support some projects than others. I think there are probably hundreds of other ways to help shape participation in the Drupal community such that end users, developers, designers and Drupal shops are able to find easier ways to contribute back. But I think we need to get the conversation moving about how to see that important projects like this get the support that they need to see that they are properly resourced.
There's a place to discuss Drupal.org improvements in GDO but there isn't a lot of active participation there.
Ultimately, what kinds of UI changes would help make this module better maintained? For folks who are active contributors, what would help you? Is finding time for maintenance seen as a problem?
Comments
Comment #1
mgiffordTagging. Also worth noting related issue #2185511: Highlight User Contributions & What They Can Do Next in Issue Queue
Comment #2
klausiI think the best help for maintainers are other non-maintainers that move issues to the correct status and review patches.
Every big module has lots of open issues, but I think maintainers can ignore all of them except the RTBC issues. Same as Drupal core - the issue queue is totally out of control and core committers only look at RTBC stuff.
I'm not at all maintaining Rules anymore and I know that fago wants to approve any patches before anyone else commits them. I should have been more transparent about not being active anymore, so I removed myself from the project page.
1000 open issues is a sign of success, not a problem by itself. Although I agree that we need more issue queue gardeners.
Comment #3
mgifford@klausi thanks for changing the title.
Maintainers can and do ignore RTBC items. Lots of modules aren't following best practices and we've done a bad job defining what that even means. I'm trying to clarify this here #2186377: Highlight projects that follow Best Practices
In large issue queues, maintainers look at the issues that matter to them at the time like everyone else and work to push those issues ahead.
Maintainers need help. Maybe we need to #2203331: Differentiation of the Maintainer Role so that someone in the community with a large issue can take on part of the responsibilities of the maintainer.
We all get busy, sorry to hear you're not able to be a maintainer of Rules any more.
How do we encourage more issue queue gardeners? Is that a better term than gnome?
Comment #4
fagoYeah, with growing projects maintainers cannot take care of the whole issue queue any more. But active participation to give directions and committing things is definitely important for the project. Issue queue gardeners definitely are a big help and do important work for the project.
That's sad - but thanks for making it explicit. You are more than welcome to get back any time.
Agreed, though I fear a lot of them are open and will be never handled. Problem specially with Rules is that it can do *a* lot and helping people with complex scenarios is very time consuming - even if its just to figure out whether something goes wrong or not. But looking at the states ~800 of 1100 issues are support requests.
Maybe we should move on and close *all* of them and politely direct them to stack exchange + note that on the project page as well? I believe that support would be better handled over there.
Yeah, for me it's currently very difficult to find enough time for it, not speaking of the 8.x port at all. Core currently sucks up most of my contribution time, while it's not enough for that either. So I try to do at least the minimum needed and take a look at RTBC stuff from time by time, but it's definitely not where it should be. Solving funding for maintenance would be certainly great, but I think it's actually the hardest one to figure out. I really like gittip, but I miss the connection to dedicated goals or even specific issues there. (e.g. do people do care about the entity work, or rules, ..?)
For Rules, I think figuring out a battle plan for the (non-trivial) 8.x port is now critical. I'd like to try to find some funding for that as I fear it will go way to slow else - I'll work something out on that front.
Comment #5
TR CreditAttribution: TR commented