(warning, grumpy rant forthcoming...) On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Noah Slater <[email protected]> wrote: > Thoughts?
It seems to me that a lot of this hinges on releases. Releases generate publicity and therefore developer interest, thus developer engagement. Releases make sure that work developers do gets into user's hands soon. CouchDB, and I am sorry to have been banging this drum for a few years now, is the worst open source project at doing releases I know. Here's a quote from this list, from February 13: > I plan to cut a release candidate from the 1.3.x branch this weekend. And another, from Nov 13: > when we set out to ship 1.3.0, we thought the cors and docs > branches were just around the corner. That was a couple of > weeks ago. We are just starting with this, but the whole > idea of time-based releases is that we do not wait for > feature branches to be ready. > > I’d like to propose that we ignore everything we’ve said > before and do the following: > > - ship 1.3.0 as reflected in the 1.3.x branch now. Here's another, from October 23: > It's been a while since we released and I want to change this now. I > propose making a 1.3.x branch from today's master > (66529378dd06342929e04772370f3509cbe786a5) and building 1.3.0 there. Another, from June 16: > 1. We'd like to proposed formal time-based releases Et cetera. As an example, the EventSource bits, which are actually something which would be very useful for us at work, were committed to the tree on May 16. They are yet to be released. I feel a bit hypocritical for saying all this, since I don't contribute much to core CouchDB (although I did do a bunch of the doc conversion, try to be helpful around the edges and maintain couchdb-python). The reason for this is mostly that I thoroughly dislike Erlang as a language, and have no intention of learning it just to help out with CouchDB. I did some Futon work back in the day, but had lots of trouble getting it committed since no one's really owned Futon for a while (and right now, it looks like other people have that bit covered, though they're using a modern but also quite complex development stack that will make it unlikely for a lowly back-end web developer dude like me to be able to contribute much). So, IMNSH and annoyingly harsh O, stop talking so much about how to energize the project, and Just. Ship. It. Every month, preferably. Fix the test suite and whatever else makes it so damn hard to release. Insert story here about that dude who realized people were trying to fix the wrong problem [1]. End of rant, cheers, Dirkjan [1] http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/
