Hi as I've already told some of you I'll be talking at the FOSS Backstage Micro-Summit in less than three weeks[1]
I'll be talking about learnings from 17 years of Ant and the challenges of aging open source projects. I'll claim that to the best of my knowledge nobody of us has ever been payed to work on Ant - we have created occasional patches during working hours but nobody was payed to work on Ant full time. Am I wrong? This is what I've planned right now (apart from an intro to Ant) is there anything you think I should also add? * Ant filled a void and was the right idea at the right time This means I have no clue what it takes to form a community as we've simply been lucky. * "every release of Ant breaks my builds" The roots of our backwards compatibility mantra and some things we consider best practices now (and maybe we've overreacted) * the Ant2 fiasco I'll try to be objective and point out the dangers of forking the community. * the power of user lists and the value of non-coding contributors To me the user list has been instrumental in forming a community beyond the committers and helped recruit new committers. I must admit that I'm not sure how te replicate its success with the Stack Overflow world we now live in. * dealing with "drive-by contributions" How the amount of tasks shipping with Ant we couldn't maintain grew, how we tried to solve the problem with antlibs - and how the later may be responsible for decrease of contributions and influx of fresh ideas. * the missed opportunity of dependency management Could something like Ivy have saved the world when introduced when it was first discussed? Why didn't we do it? IMHO Maven Central was more important that Maven (or Ivy could have been) for dependency management to work and it took a company with commercial interest to create it. * Aging project Running out of itches to scratch. Very little easy tasks remain to be done. Finding new contrubutors becomes very difficult (and we may be making it hard for new folks to join). Committers age as well, prepare for losing them. Stefan [1] https://berlinbuzzwords.de/17/news/foss-backstage-micro-summit-program-online-now pre-registration is open at https://berlinbuzzwords.de/17/news/foss-backstage-micro-summit-registration-open-now if anybody is interested in coming along and chat. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org
