On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 7:02 PM, Ryan Boggs <rmbo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > As you can see, we are in need of help. As it stands right now, there > are about 3/4 active people just for the NAnt project. Our main focus > has been revitalizing the NAnt core project and so far we have been > successful. With that being said, a lot of people use NAntContrib > together with NAnt, so it's critical to bring that up that project > up-to-date as well. >
OK, just a had a quick browse through what's in NAntContrib, and I have the following suggestions: 1) Move <msbuild> into NAnt core. This is probably one of the more commonly used tasks in contrib. Moving it into core would help all those people who either want to move over slowly or who inherited complex solution files. 2) Move each "cluster" of source control tasks into its own project. Not only will this make NAnt better as a whole (by forcing us to better document how to write a plugin with a few tasks), it will also make maintenance far more approachable by greatly reducing the perceived complexity. Hopefully it will also make it clearer which ones are actually widely used and which ones only have a tiny handful of users. My suspicion here is that the <svn> and <vss> tasks are really the only ones in widespread use, all the others are likely to have much smaller communities of users who are happy to maintain their 5 or 6 tasks but could care less about the wider Contrib tasks. 3) Most of the remaining tasks are simple wrappers around command-line executables. At this point it's worth a look to see if <exec> is a better replacement, how far out of date they are, and whether or not they can be grouped effectively. Really, the biggest issue with Contrib is that it basically became a dumping ground for anything developers couldn't be bothered to put in core, but were somehow willing to maintain. Obviously that wasn't the intention, just the end result. NAnt needs a story about how you write a NAnt plugin, drop it in the assembly cache (or the right directory) and have the tasks just work. I *might* be willing to maintain tasks like <wsdl> and <fxcop>, but there is no way I'm going to maintain BizTalk tasks. Those should be maintained as its own project by whatever community cares about it. Reorganising the code and dropping tasks the active people aren't using will *force* people to stand up and declare that, yes, they will maintain this or that set of tasks. And if no-one steps up, then you can drop those tasks with a clear conscience, because they're obviously not important enough to anyone to maintain (and legacy users can just keep using the old version or grab the last version of the source code, clean, and re-submit). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ nant-developers mailing list nant-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nant-developers
