dazz, you invented propositions I did not make, and also showed no apparent comprehension of bugzilla in use.
I plan not to post further on this thread mainly so you can no longer use my words to fly off in random directions of your choosing. I am not finding your comments useful or enlightening.
Examples:
Rightio.
Oh… It seems the visions are many and varied.
The first two sentences of your final paragraph are essentially unrelated. You might not understand that.
A moderator has already asked to stick to the topic. Having responded to both of you and pike_it, I’ll leave it to avoid risk on my part.
You will also see that on the first page, there is a section that explains where NOT to report those things. Simply, because Discourse is not a bug tracker. There are many posts here, they cannot be referenced by ID and sometimes it is even very hard to find something in the evening that I had read the same morning.
Why do we have these processes? Because it happens that people simply dump comments, sometimes changed scripts and tell us: Here, have it. That is not good enough for the development process of this project. First and foremost we prioritise security and with that comes quality of changes and accountability.
The development process that we are using has been tested over many years and is very similar to many other open source projects. For example the Linux kernel itself. And it works.
GitHub for example has been promoting this “dumping” of changes - they call it a pull request - and that process is one of the many other ways to do things which don’t work for us.
If something is unclear about things, there is one place where to get in touch with the development team:
That is sadly incorrect. You might not have done that, but we do get emails from people who feel free to do so.
This project isn’t a democracy. There are democratic elements to how we make decisions, but it simply isn’t possible for us to make decisions based on majorities. And the reason for that is that we have a huge code base that people would need to know to make a decision. That is not the case, and so we cannot allow people to make decisions out of the blue. We would end of having votes for unicorns and flying cars, just because people would want it - not knowing much about what it actually takes to realise things.
We have tried approaches like crowdfunding in the past which is for example a way where people vote with money. That was however a complete disaster because it was often hard to understand for the funders that simple features require a lot of funding, deeming the process failed from the very start.
In the end, IPFire is of course open source. If the way we are doing things here is not satisfactory, everyone is of course free to fork this project and try their own luck.
Nobody rejected things. In your case, probably nobody else really cared as much as you did.
There is the phrase of scratching your own itch which is the reason why so many open source projects came into existence.
If you want to have a product customised for you (anything really, but let’s maybe say a suit) then you will have to pay someone to do it for you, or you will have to do it yourself. Tailors generally don’t work without being paid. That is also true for myself. Not because I am greedy for money (doing open source is not a good way to become rich), but because I need to fill my fridge and pay my rent, too. I cannot simply sit around all day and develop the things that I want, or somebody else wants. That would be great if I could do that, and our entire donation program is there so that developers can have that freedom, but sadly it is not funding a lot of development work at all.
So, especially when it comes to usability things (replacing icons, renaming buttons), you don’t need a developer. That is a trivial task that can be done by others. And that is what open source projects live from: contribution from others. When I use that word, I explicitly do not mean financial contribution.
Another reason why sometimes you will get little to no reaction on here is because of a proposal not being made the first time. Does IPFire have the best web UI that has ever been? No. Can we make lots of improvements? Yes.
This is not news to us. So don’t expect people to be absolutely excited about some idea that has been discussed many times at length. Trust me, we are working on that.
Why would we only do what we want? Obviously this project exists to be used. By the users.
I am having loads of conversations with people about this. I am sure that I have a pretty good idea which ones are the most pressing items that we need to work on, and which are not. Are those fully representative? No, but they don’t have to be.
I once again disagree with you here. Especially because you are using a car analogy where we have a famous quote from Henry Ford which goes a bit like: If I would have asked people what they need they would have said faster horses.
In the history of IPFire, we have experienced similar many times. Just because something looks like an obviously logical solution doesn’t mean it’s the right way to go forward.
I suppose you will have to have trust in Henry Ford and us as developers that we know which is best. And you will have to trust that we don’t pull any decisions out of thin air, but actually listen and gather as much evidence and data as possible.
Yes, that is okay. IPFire is not a firewall that will make everyone in the world happy. It is designed for a special group of people by a special group of people. And it is far from perfect.
But that is the good thing about the open source world, or even with so many commercial products available: There are alternatives. If you don’t like one, use something else.
Have a try at Cisco (I heard they are selling lots of firewalls) and try to have this discussion with them. You won’t get very far at all. Here, we do listen to you. We understood what you have to say, and believe me, at some point this will influence something that we do.
We cannot however keep having discussions about small things like this for forever. There are so many people that use IPFire and a large silent group is very happy with IPFire is and what it does.
For those who are not happy, there are ways how to influence this project and give their input. There is no guarantee it will be heard, and there is no guarantee it will be realised; although we try as hard as we can.
At the end of the day, we will have to protect the most scarce resource this project has: Time. People’s time.
Hence you might disagree with our development process, but it has indeed been optimised for this one goal. Without that, we don’t need to talk about any next feature, because nobody will have the time to make any meaningful changes to the distribution.
So, I hope that I could answer your questions and I strongly believe that we actually are on the same page. We both want the same: That this project is becoming even more successful than it is now. We might disagree about the how, which is why I am asking you to follow the path that the project has chosen. We have great people here, we have great tools and we have great goals. We need to work together to achieve them though.