I didn’t have a chance to dig into Daniele Scasciafratte‘s report and analysis regarding WordPress core contributions when he shared it in April. It’s a simple assessment that gives you a good, albeit frustrating, picture of how difficult it is to close tickets on issues.
Daniele’s numbers are based solely on Trac tickets and reveal that “tickets take an average of 2-3 years” to be patched and closed.
Some implications:
So for a contributor in a WordCamp … to get a review of the patch the average is like 3 years.
You can [imagine] what happens with all this delay, the patch is not aligned anymore with the WordPress code and maybe also with the coding standards. Without considering that the original developer in the meantime abandoned the community or doesn’t remember anything about that code when there is finally a review.
Like Jordi Cabot noted here earlier this year, getting Trac over to GitHub would be a dream for how it would open up deeper research into WordPress’s culture of contribution — and research on the project would make a great 5ftF contribution too.
