Hi, On Sunday, December 23, 2018, Stephen Connolly < stephen.alan.conno...@gmail.com> wrote: > > If we have good reliable tooling, then we hope to be able to encourage > contributions (as you don’t need a CLA for an “obvious” ~10-15 line patch - > intent to submit is sufficient) and get the code base more energised. >
As a tentative new contributor, I'd like to voice that it seems to me that the issues in getting more contributors are not first about code style or technologies. (This is based on my experience.in the Eclipse IDE project where some components were in a bad shape in term of community activity, comparable to how Maven is right now, and managed to get better.) While cleaner more modern and more «inclusive» code helps, adapting to another code style or older code is still a simple enough exercise for contributors to keep motivated and providing code. What I feel missing in Maven project to make contributors feel more welcome is reactivity and guidance of the core developers towards contributions: it takes a lot of time to get feedback on a Jira and a PR, and I had to ping contributors to get feedback. I still don't get why my patches are not yet merged while feedback seems good. Being that insisting isn't something many people can afford or like or dare to do. This lack of apparent interest in external contributions is what can kill any open-source project. It also seems like reviewing and testing PRs is not trivial, and that more automation could help developers to trust incoming changes and deal with reviews. So it you want more contributors in Maven,I think the #1 item by far is to make sure PRs are reviewed and merged promptly and then that the «time to market» between a patch and a release is short enough to not leave time to contributors to consider competitve technologies or workarounds they'll never contribute back. This goes by having a mindset that makes core developers main task to grow the community rather than fixing bugs or adding features. About Maven 4.0, I don't have an opinion and am not enthusiast (that's my natural reaction to revolutions over simple evolution). I'm curious about what's the added value to produce and whether it's worth the risk and effort. But again, from my experience with Eclipse IDE,I think it's fundamental to get a vibrant and flawless developer community before starting such a revolution; and I don't have the impression current Maven community is big and agile enough to sustain big changes. That said, I think Maven already enables some important success criteria, like being on GitHub. So I'm confident things can and will improve to grow the community. Cheers, -- Mickael Istria Eclipse IDE <https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/eclipse-packages/> developer, for Red Hat Developers <https://developers.redhat.com/>
