I have not personally been affected by the long time periods between the code drops. I doubt it has had a serious impact on many other contributors. Although there have certainly been a few issues highlighted in the mailing list around the hosting API and some other internal chunks of code that have delayed people trying to work on top of IR - the SaphireSteel guys come to mind, I still believe this has not really been a problem, since even in a totally open environment, people would need to wait on the core team to deliver API's anyway, no?
I think the main problem with the current wall-tossing arrangement is that it creates a feeling of, "this is a their (Microsoft) project" rather than "this is our (community) project". Contributors feel no ownership of the code they contribute, let alone the project as a whole. What gets people excited, and encouraged to contribute, to a project is the feeling that they own some part of it or have some responsibility in the direction and decision making. Bug fixing patches and fleshing out code stubs is very important but not too exciting for many developers. It would have been an interesting exercise to break off self-standing components of the Iron Ruby libraries and set them up as independent OSS projects of their own that are primarily stored in SVN and imported into MS Team repositories on occasion rather than the other way around. Obvious candidates are the YAML processor, the Regex engine, and any other components that require substantial C# code to be written, and design decisions to be made. It is not too late to implement something like this. If a bit of work could be done on loading external IR libraries then projects could begin to be setup independently. This would have the multiple benefit of getting people to work on interesting and challenging projects, potentially creating alternative options to the IR community but also those people working on the projects are more likely to pickup bugs and add in the smaller patches to the core that are not getting people excited at the moment. My two pennies. Pete -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Lam (IRONRUBY) Sent: Monday,28 April 28, 2008 16:35 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Ironruby-core] Regarding IronRuby... How true it sounds from this blog M. David Peterson: > > It's far more difficult (maybe impossible) to run an OSS project well > > if the community members can't update their working copies to exactly > > what the core team sees day-to-day. This one is most likely an MS > issue. > > It's absolutely 100% an internal MSFT issue. Can it be fixed? While meta-level discussions are interesting, they generally don't offer much in the way of concrete guidance. So let me ask this question to the larger community: Has working on the SVN sources (with the attendant delays in propagating to / from our version of 'the truth') blocked you from working on a contribution? Thanks, -John _______________________________________________ Ironruby-core mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core _______________________________________________ Ironruby-core mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
