Hi Wes, others, Thank you for taking the time to draft a long response.
On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 3:57 PM Wes McKinney <wesmck...@gmail.com> wrote: > > From a purely factual view, the project is successfully attracting and > supporting contributors. Over 500 different people have contributed to > the project (more than the "420" printed on GitHub because many people > use e-mail addresses not associated with their GitHub user names) and > that number is increasing steadily over time. This response reinforces one of my points, all this branch name change business then has nothing to do with actually getting new contributors. > We have invested greatly in providing systems to support developers of > the project. We have a large and complex CI setup and nowadays it > works pretty much like clockwork which is a huge change compared with > a year or two ago. Agreed, and I have learned a lot from it just by observing. > If you are looking for individualized "mentorship and guidance" > _beyond_ pointers toward what part of the project you should be > looking at to solve a problem, feedback on issues about whether or not > something is deemed useful or high priority or not, and feedback on > your PRs whether you are on the right track or not, I think your > expectations -- at this stage of the project -- may not be reasonable. > The number of regularly active developers in this project for the > parts that you have looked at is actually quite small. So you're > talking about some of the 10 people at the top of the GitHub > contributor list. It would be different if we were talking about an > older project with an order of magnitude more regularly active > developers. If pointers to you are: look at the serialisation code, then yes, I was hoping for more along the lines of look at class XYZ in file bla. I completely understand if that's not possible. That is why I never said anything before. You may not remember, during the "whether to support wheels" discussion, as I was impacted, I offered a compromise of releasing a reduced feature-set wheel with simpler dependencies, which was rejected with this exact argument. I did not counter, because it is a very reasonable position to take, and I'm in no position to "demand" anything. I only wrote today because I felt maybe now there is a willingness for newer, diverse contributors, because that's how this thread was motivated. So I stated the hurdles I have faced, and hoped instead of wasting scarce resources on superficial changes the community could address actual hurdles for new contributors like me. Obviously I misunderstood. > The area where I think we could improve the most is developer > documentation, which in a sense is "self-service guidance" in > understanding the codebases. Antoine and others have taken initiative > on this but it often goes by the way side since the number of people > with requisite knowledge to write it is small (countable on fingers > and toes if you include all the programming languages) and very short > of free cycles. I'm guessing you mean the Sphinx docs? Whatever I have managed to use Arrow for, it's thanks to those. Maybe that is my cue, when hitting a dead-end, "I should ask which source file do I look in?" Anyway, I don't want to waste anyone's time anymore. I felt there's room for feedback, I was wrong, and I withdraw from this discussion. I'll continue to lurk on the mailing list, and try to contribute when I can. Cheers and thanks for your time, -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.
