On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 4:13 AM, Mike Percy <mpe...@apache.org> wrote:
> However the reason I mention it is that up until now, others I've spoken to within the Hadoop community have felt that large new > algorithm contributions are basically what will earn someone committership > on Mahout. Based on this thread, consensus seems to be forming that that is > *not* what is desired. So what's your rough ideal committer at this point > in the life of Mahout if they are not contributing new algorithms? I guess > it's things like code reviews, correctness fixes, perf improvements, and > refactorings / enhancements? > > It's the same that is true for other open source projects as well: Help with improving the existing code base, providing help to users, help with documentation etc. As Grant pointed out there is an existing wiki page that explains how to contribute - both in terms of technical details but also in terms of topics the project needs help with in general. Please let us know if you find anything missing on that page. > Regarding attribution, I saw it mentioned elsewhere in this thread and I > noticed it myself so I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents. While it seems like > a small thing, I wonder whether instituting the Hadoopish "Contributed by > so-and-so" in commit messages to assign credit for patches by > non-committers would be help make contributors feel more appreciated for > their work. Especially if you want to encourage people to contribute lots > of small patches on their way to committership. Alternatively, putting > "(Joe Newbie via Jim Veteran)" into every commit also acknowledges the > committer/reviewer, which is not an easy job and can help people feel > appreciated for that work as well. > I think this is a good point. It has been done in the past but not particularly consistently: Some effort was made to assign JIRAs to the people who worked most on them, commit messages contained the name of the contributor etc. The point in time I personally learnt what difference this can make was when contributing some code to Tomcat - there my name would appear in Bugzilla, the commit message and even in the release notes. From a contributor's point of view this was a really nice experience even though getting the patch accepted took quite some time. > Finally, if there are places where the current committers know Mahout needs > work, or has holes, have those been articulated in any specific way? If not > I think that would be awesome. I know that in general, several of the docs > are out of date on the wiki. I suppose that's one. I wonder what else tops > the to-do list. Is there something other than just the open JIRA list < > > https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=project%20%3D%20MAHOUT%20AND%20status%20%3D%20Open%20ORDER%20BY%20priority%20DESC > >? > > Good point indeed. Also I think we should re-visit the "easy hacks" mark on JIRA tickets. An in my opinion really good example for how such a page could look like from another non-Apache project: < https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks> (note in particular this one: <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39468> ;) ) Isabel
