On Thursday 18 October 2018 09:28:31 Dustin J. Mitchell wrote: > Hi! I hacked on Amanda for a while before joining Mozilla 8 years ago > (today!). > > While I was at Zmanda I worked pretty hard to keep the project > accessible to non-employees. While we did have a solid core of > helpful power-users, substantial code-related participation was rare > at best. I think there were a variety of reasons for that, and some > of the work we did aimed to change it (rewriting from C to Perl, and > specifically the Application API). But at least in my time it never > really took off. > > I also see that Amanda itself has not seen a lot of work recently -- > the most recent commit is in February. > > I would suggest a few things: > * Focus on the strengths -- perhaps form some kind of advisory > council comprised of long-time community members that can give > guidance on project direction. I know that's a little scary for a > company, but "advisory" is a little softer than "governance". That > group could probably advise on the remainder of my suggestions. > * Put the code on Github. Maybe it feels like selling out, but > that's a massively lower bar to entry than sourceforge / svn. > Buildbot did this about 10 years ago and the bump in participation was > massive. * Set up some kind of public CI -- maybe Travis is enough, or > maybe set up Buildbot (or Taskcluster.. I feel obligated to say > that..) > * Actively groom casual contributors: > * Set up "good first bug" tagged issues -- tasks with small scope > that can be accomplished by a newcomer in a day or two > * Participate in programs like GSoC, Outreachy, GCI, or host > hackathons at relevant conferences > * Provide a simple, well-tested getting-started-hacking guide > > Somewhat longer-term, it might be good to talk about what Amanda wants > to be. Amanda's *old* - 26 years old! What is its specialty in the > modern, cloud-driven era? With limited development resources, it > doesn't make sense to pretend Amanda is good for things where it is a > bad fit.
IMO the judgement of its being a bad fit is entirely in the mind of the local administrator. An educational package of docs aimed at that person is 20+ years overdue. > > Dustin Coming from you Dustin, thats great advice. IMO while you were working on it, some real progress was made. Copyright 2018 by Maurice E. Heskett -- Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
