Hi Paul,
please see inline:
On Mar 14, 2014, at 11:00 AM, Paul Piper <[email protected]> wrote:
I wouldn't necessarily say that what Pierre brings up is unjust, but
understandably this is a heated discussion. I would bring it down to two few
core points. Obviously this will offend some, but please bare with me:
1. Commitment starts with recognition
I completely disagree that the problem is that the PMC/committers group is not noticing contributors; the problem is instead that the current
admission bar that we have set, is probably too high for this community. It is true that we are not inviting enough committers and PMC members (and
in fact I think we should find ways to fix this, and we have started a preliminary discussion about this) but just because, with the current rules,
there are not good candidates. In my opinion, we will have to work at ways to facilitate the growth of new volunteers and we will also have to
lower the admission bar by setting up stricter reviews to counterbalance the risk of affecting the quality of commits.
As regards your specific position, since this seems to be your main
concern/complain, please see below:
I think that the community has a problem with recognizing contributions
properly. I am running a company and thus lack the time to review code on a
daily basis, over the years I have, however, contributed thousands of hours
to this community. I represented OFBiz as a speaker at the ApacheCon, wrote
articles to magazines, committed large parts of code and bugfixes (among
them since 2006: Apache Solr integration, SEO Updates, Axis2 integration,
etc.), committed bugfixes, added wiki documents and helped wherever I could
(not even counting in all the free workshops and presentations i have given
to people interested in the topic). And though I am only a single person, I
think I can say that it went largely unnoticed.
Here is the whole list of commits in which you have some credit (over a few
years):
rev. 1423117: fix for one label
rev. 1304205: new category trail method (OFBIZ-4580); no ootb code has ever
used it
rev. 728455: minor correction done by Jacques based on your bug report to the
user list
rev. 1234014: minor: "Thanks to Paul Piper for his help about this last point, by
pointing about XSD reference."
rev. 1430332: German labels for the Accounting application (OFBIZ-5108)
We all appreciate your help and I understand that even small contributions like these can initially take a lot of time and effort but unfortunately
these are still considered minor contributions by many; I guess this is the reason no one in the PMC has proposed you as a candidate for being
invited as committer so far; but please go on, work hard and keep a positive and non-conflictual attitude and I am sure that you will be noticed.
As regards your contributions to Jira (uncommitted code, code reviews and misc
comments), here is the whole list of what we have in our records:
* OFBIZ-4581 (2011/11): rejected/not a problem
* OFBIZ-4666 (2012/01): rejected/invalid
* OFBIZ-3877 (2012/11): one comment
* OFBIZ-5037 (2012/11): a bug report
* OFBIZ-5312/OFBIZ-4535 (2013/11): initial requirements and comments/reviews; up to now only the experimental SEO branch was affected (the task
history is a huge mess)
* OFBIZ-5042 (2012/11): Solr component; no code has been committed yet but I have a series of concerns about this work that I will soon try to fix
by committing some code changes to the specialpurpose/lucene component in order to enhance it to support also Solr
* OFBIZ-4769 (2012/12): one comment
* OFBIZ-4833 (2012/12): one comment
* OFBIZ-5109 (2012/12): comments
* OFBIZ-3972 (2013/01): one comment
* OFBIZ-5248 (2013/06): one comment
* OFBIZ-5040 (2014/01): discussion about UI technologies in OFBiz
Again, in my opinion the above activity, even if valuable for the project,
cannot be considered very high.
In addition to this, you have never participated to voting threads, nor helped
testing new releases and these are important aspects of the project.
From a business perspective
i would put it as a "bad investment", but we continue to do it for the love
of the project. I noticed that I am not alone in this, other people, like
Angus Gow
I could just find one email from him, no activity in Jira nor in the commit
history.
or Rupert Howell
Here are some stats for Rupert (activity since 2007):
* OFBIZ-721: unfinished work, never committed
* OFBIZ-707: unfinished work, never committed
* OFBIZ-699: reported a broken link in the OFBiz website
* OFBIZ-5307: bug report resolved as "not a problem"
* OFBIZ-5282: reviews and comments
* rev. 1001789: "Auto-complete for dropdowns"
are also examples I could name right away that
haven't received enough recognition for their contributions.
Again, do not get me wrong: I greatly appreciate the help you all are providing and I want to personally thank you for each piece of contribution;
but I still think that this level of activity may make impractical to invite you as contributors (or at least this has been true with the current
rules).
2. Not everybody in the PMC is active or invested in the community
This is a completely different topic that doesn't affect in any way our
decisions about new committers.
I am not against discussing the idea to ask old inactive committers and PMC members to resign from their role, for the sake of keeping our lists
clear (and I also mentioned this in the past to the PMC).
However this is a super low priority and maybe also a bad idea if you look at
this according to the spirit that inspired these rules at the ASF:
* if you do enough work and the PMC votes you to become a committer or PMC of the project, then you deserve to have your name listed forever in the
committers/PMC group, unless you ask to resign
* in this way the project officially recognizes that an individual plays or has played (at least in a period of the life of the project) an
important role
* there is no upper limit to the number of committers and PMC members, so the
inactive ones do not cause any harm to the new potential candidates
In the analysis below there are few errors that have been pointed out by
others, so I will not comment further.
Kind regards,
Jacopo
The way I understand the argument is that the OFBiz Community is structured
into groups (contributors, committers, pmc), where personal commitment gets
you higher in the ranks. This is not the case for the PMC, however. Just
glancing over the wiki page, there are several people listed that haven't
been active in recent months or sometimes even years. Just to name a few:
* Ashish Vijaywargiya (most active till 2010)
* Anil Patel (most active till 2010)
* Vikas Mayur
* Paul Foxworthy
* David Welton (probably supported the project in the early stages)
* Yoav Shapira (probably supported the project in the early stages)
* Joseph Eckard
* Bilgin Ibryam
Andrew Zeneski has been the last addition to the committee in 2013, before
him there hasn't been any change since 2007. The same argument could be made
for a few people who are not really invested into the community any longer,
push their own products, or have moved on to new projects.
This is quite uncommon for a project that is based on personal commitment
and begs the question why a committee remains static whereas clearly the
project moves forward.
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