Am 13.11.13 08:00, schrieb Brett Porter:
Hi Raphael,
Thanks for checking in. You were right in another message, I was on holidays.
It was not me who find out, that you was in holidays, but welcome back
anyway.
There are people here willing to develop on the project, but time comes and
goes for each. When we first brought the project into Apache, there was
interest from several others, including some Apache committers, but it waned -
and though we get occasional patches from new people, we've had trouble getting
them on as committers. I'm glad to see the interest sparked by your message,
which I'll respond to separately.
Thanks for your point of view. And now we have to look forward here,
learn from the errors, and make it better in future.
In terms of mentors, we've gradually lost them over time, and I was
unsuccessful in recruiting new ones from general@.
I notice also, there is not much interest in NPanday at Incubator. Even
on my message was no answare exept from Marvin. I asked also for new
mentors, but no one react.
We very much need an active mentor to keep us honest :) I hope you'll
volunteer...
I'm not a IPMC Member, so I can't right now. But feel free to propose me
as Mentor on Incubator... Maybe the table turns. But I'm anyway a newbie
as mentor. In this situation I would realy like to see a more
experianced Mentor
For the overall status:
We need to ship 1.5.0. Unfortunately, while the Windows build slave was broken
for a while some changes were made that broke compatibility. They are good
changes, but the regressions need to be fixed to ship a release.
Aside from that, the project is reasonably stable. There are additions here and
there for new releases that come out, and some potential architectural changes
to take advantage of recent developments in .NET and Maven and cruft to clear
out, but otherwise it pretty much does what you need it to do. That can make it
hard to attract new contributors.
I would accept this answar if we have no open issues at jira. It's realy
dangeros to believe that the project needs no more development. A
project who suffers build breakers for months is far away from perfect.
Even there are only this build breakers. I believe more, that exactly
this build breakers stop new contributors. At OpenOffice build breakers
are cleaned up verry soon, or we revert the change. Why people can't
first test it localy befor commit?
One thing that could be improved is Mono support. While some things exist, the
existing developers don't use it - so that's an area for new contributors to
get involved.
Another challenge I've found is that contributors tend to interact purely over
JIRA or even reach out over Skype. It has been difficult to get more happening
on this list as it should.
That's a problem, we have realy work on it. But I will open a separate
thread for it. You can have some talks behind the scane, but all
important thing has to go over the lists. You know this, I know this.
But learning the Apache Way is not always easy. At Apache OpenOffice
have had also hard times at the beginning.
I'll put this in as a report for this month if it is not too late.
Too late for November, but you can prepare one for December ;-)
Thanks again for following up.
No problem, I'm happy to see activity here.
Greetings Raphael
