Hi everybody,
I am actually thinking about going for much shorter development cycles
when it comes to making Castor releases available. My intention - as
already stated in the announcement email for Castor 1.3.2 - is to
provide Castor 1.3.3 within 6 weeks (+/- 2 weeks) from the 1.3.2 release
date.
Whilst I would love to keep this rhythm up and going for a long time, my
(our) resources are limited by nature. Still, here's my offer: I'll try
to keep working towards 6 to 8 weeks cycles as long as there's more and
improved input form the user community.
How to interpret this ? Well, Castor has been an open source project now
for 10+ years. And I'd like to see it that way for another 10 years. But
I have already invested a lot of time into this project (having been a
committer for the last 8 years), and it honestly feels quite 'lonely'
out there from time to time.
Having said that, I have seen some increased feedback on Jira issues in
the weeks before the 1.3.2 release, and I believe that such feedback
(whether in form of testing or patch provision or documentation patches
or new HOW-TOs) does pay back, indeed. At least to me it did in the
sense that it (once again) provided enough motivation to keep myself
going and work towards the 1.3.2 release two weeks ago. A process that
has been painful now an then, to be honest.
Here's what I'd like to discuss in general terms and propose to/ask of
the community in terms of making Castor more iterative and improve its
quality/feature base:
* The more communication we (committers) get, the more it feels like an
open source project with actual involvement from the community. Most of
the Jira issues we get to see are bug reports (for a valid reason, that
is). But most of the time, that's it. Being an open source project,
there's the sources. It actually is possible to assess the source code
and identify a problem area. Not everyone is capable/willing to provide
a patch out of nothing, but a patch does not have to actually include
working code and resolve a problem completely. We are very happy to take
patches that provide comments (that actually match the flow of a test
case provided, that identify code areas that you think are wrong, ...),
pseudo code, etc.
* Communication is essential, indeed. There's Jira to report issues and
have meaningful conversations (at least we try) about their resolutions.
But there's more to an open source project. There's mailing lists, like
this one, where the community can ask questions related to the product
offerings. There's the dev list, which to my surprise seem to be highly
unused. Why is this ? And more generally speaking: what else has been
missed over the last years ?
* How many people actually visit Castor's Jira instance on a regular
base ? How many are actually 'reading' (aka following) the activity
stream on the 'Summary' page '? How many are subscribed to the RSS feed
representing this 'activity stream' ?
* And most importantly, what are folks actually missing most from Castor
? Is there a genuine feeling that the product e.g. is not mature enough,
lacks (certain) features, etc. ?
I most definitely do acknowledge that Castor is a complex project,
especially in terms of its code base (with major parts having been
written around 2000), which could use some heavy refactoring. But in the
end this needs to be a community effort, and that's what I'd like to see
happen.
Thanks for your time reading this, and thanks (once again) to everybody
that provided well-though feedback and input during the last few weeks.
And please do not hesitate to ask questions as a result of this email.
Kind Regards
Werner Guttmann
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