Fortress mode activated!

Some of you may have noticed the message below while trying to interact with the Github issue tracker:

This is the result of a change made in the repository settings for the Lutris client and website. The setting limits interactions (bug reports, pull requests) to previous contributors or members of internal teams. This is an unexpected move for an Open Source project but it was deemed to be the best solution to make the project move forward.

This restriction to the repository is in no way permanent but it is also not going away soon. At the moment, restrictions are applied for a duration of 6 months but they may be lifted earlier depending on how fast we can meet our goals.

Now let’s talk about why this was done and what is the end goal of partially closing the issue tracker. There are a multitude of reasons that, with time, were considered big enough problems to require action.

First, there is a clear imbalance in the flow of issues on Github. Issues are created faster than they can be resolved, resulting in an ever increasing ticket count. As time goes by, an increasing proportion of new issues are directly related to older issues not being worked on. Reducing the flow of issues will allow us to catch up on the issues marked for the 0.5.x versions. We currently have 138 issues out of 220 that are marked for a 0.5.x release but a continuous flow of new tickets makes it really hard to decrease that number.

Then there is the problem about patches being sent as pull requests that are increasingly hard to deal  with. I am not referring to simple bug fixes but more evolved patches, bringing new functionality or changing existing ones. Patches are often misaligned with the project’s goals, or they do not fit in architecturally in the project, or they add to parts of legacy code that needs refactoring. As we are starting the development of 0.5.9, we are going to tackle some of the most sensitive areas of the project and make process monitoring, Wine management and Steam integration a lot more tight and controlled. This means that every change made has to be very carefully designed and crafted. Nothing can be left to chance and this major endeavor requires all participants to share a same vision and final goal.

Note that this is not in any way a full lock down of the Github repo. Over 200 existing contributors still have access and we are accepting new members by creating dedicated teams (A new Translators team has been created, you can ask to be added to it if you want to send translations). This is meant to slow down interactions on the bug tracker and not completely stop them.

Within this 6 months period, we should also be pushing some updates to the website making it easier to discuss game or installer specific issues. The installer moderation queue also has to be redesigned because, like the Github issues, those are getting clogged up as well. We are thinking about having a more community driven system, like Wikipedia, with optional maintainers for highly popular games.

Hopefully, we hope that this will benefit everyone in the end. Maybe this is the chance to get a more cohesive development team. What is certain is that the road to Lutris 0.6.0 seems less sinuous and risky now. 6 months to Lutris 0.6.0? Hopefully even less!