Burning Chrome

Who actively owns Transaction Manager?

Bug 179621, desperately seeking sr

Okay, I've tried being nice. I've tried being discreet. I've even tried a letter to staff. Now, I'm officially upset.

If anyone cares to notice, this particular bug's first patch has been idling in Bugzilla for nineteen months. After having my work blocked for a year waiting for the r+, I've gotten two r+ annotations from people who really don't have a solid grip on the TxMgr API. So, I asked for r? again (or sr) for the TxMgr-specific stuff. In other words, the r? on the patch is meaningless if I get a decent strong reviewer to check my work. Which has not happened and shows no sign of ever happening, unless I take drastic measures. Bouncing from one unresponsive reviewer to another isn't drastic enough.

Seven days ago, I got frustrated to the point of e-mailing staff (on the advice of #developers, when I would've e-mailed Brendan Eich alone instead, to avoid creating a scene). The number of replies I got is not encouraging.

Now, I expect some people who see this blog entry to instinctively point me to the mozilla.org module owners page under Composer (which is responsible for TxMgr). Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to do a bit of good, because from my point of view as a developer, hardly anyone within the mozilla.org community seems to care about Mozilla Composer anymore.

Daniel Glazman started work on N|vu a long time ago, and I respect him for that. But his company appears to be the only ones working on improvements to Mozilla Composer codebase, and they haven't gotten any large-scale checkins to Composer landed yet. So whatever he's doing isn't quite closed-source, but the barrier to entry (as I noted in the N|vu developers mailing list) is quite high.

It's even higher in the mozilla.org codebase directly, because we're letting it bit rot, byte mold, and Hertz mushroom. The Mozilla Foundation has continued to drive efforts on browsing (Mozilla Firefox, great work) and mail (Mozilla Thunderbird, great work). But who within the community is driving tools to edit web pages? Who's active in owning Mozilla Composer and its components, such as Transaction Manager?

As far as I can tell, there are no visible leaders on that, other than Daniel Glazman (and he's busy).

This means that when someone wants to get reviews on a fundamental piece of Editor architecture, he waits... and waits... and waits...

and waits...

and after long enough, gets tired of waiting and writes a blog entry to beg for help.

Mozilla Composer and our documentation effort appear to be the pariahs of the mozilla.org community. (Coincidence, then, that these happen to be two of my favorite subjects within the community?) It is immensely depressing to see this.

Please, I beg the miniature community of strong reviewers and/or people familiar with Transaction Manager: get me out of this DOM-Inspector-blocking mess and either approve the patch or tell me what I'm doing wrong with the patch. Please, don't leave me hanging, because this noose is getting pretty tight.

Posted by WeirdAl at November 17, 2004 11:00 PM