I realy do think nutch is great, but I echo Matthias's comments that the community needs to come together and contirbute more back. And that comes with the requirement of making sure volunteers are given access to make their contributions part of the project.
Also, if you use nutch you should be answering other users questions as long as you are actively reading the nutch list and you know the answer. Thats is almost your obligation for using free open source software. Putting the faqs and tutorial on the website and not the wiki maybe one of the two biggest problems in getting people started learning nutch. -----Original Message----- From: Matthias Jaekle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2006 5:27 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: project vitality? > I am sorry if you don't like my opinion or the way it is expressed. Hi Richard, most of your opinion I think is the same as mine. I use nutch now since spring 2004 for our page http://www.umkreisfinder.de It was a big effort to learn how nutch is working and also a big effort to learn how to implement plugins. Seems to be a big system :) Much of the stuff I know is about version 0.5 or maybe 0.7. It is really difficult to keep up-to-date with all the stuff which is going on. In the last month I did not have the time to read all the messages on the mailing list, so I also feel less knowing about what's going on. I think the only way to keep informed what's going on with nutch is to read the mailing list each day. That's bad - I could not spent so much time :( Sometimes replies on the mailing list are extremly fast, sometimes there is no response. No response for technical questions, no response if volunteers ask how they could help and no response if bugfixes or code snippets with some improvements are mailed to the mailing list. I only can agree, if you think this is bad. It is bad. Not only that there are persons, who would never come to a state where they could help the project - because they did not get the first wattles - also progress of the nutch project would be slowed down if bugfixes and questions how to voluneer are ignored. I only could suggest to post all patches and improvements to the jira system, so that this information would never be lost. For me it seems a little bit like many persons are working on the code they need, sometimes two persons need the same code - fine -, but if somebody is working on a project or bugfix nobody else of the community currently needs - very bad. Also it is a big question, if and when patches are submitted, which are in the moment only needed by their programmer. I thinks we - the whole nutch community - should think about how we could generate the most value for nutch if persons ask how to volunteer. And also we should think about how we could pay tribute for stuff made by volunteres. Maybe if we simply check and add their improvements to the offical code as soon as possible. Maybe we should organize us ourself a little bit better in this point. What do you think? It also made be useful to ask all future volunteers to work on some parts of the wiki to get a better documentation. Maybe some of the nutch specialists must then look over the documentation is created by beginners. May I ask: How much persons are currently working on nutch? How much time do we alltogehter currently spend on nutch? I am currently working on code to identify geographic information on websites to improve local searches, but did not find time to implement my ideas. Much other stuff to do :( I also feel that I should not start implementing this code until I understand all the stuff which would be new in the next release. Maybe I understand all the important new stuff when reading the release information of the new version as soon as it is available. Last but not least, THANKS to all volunteers who worked on nutch. I am glad to be able to use nutch for our services. It is great to have the code of all the volunteers and run them together with the one percent of the code I have developed for our website. Thanks for reading my post Matthias -- http://www.eventax.com - eventax GmbH http://www.umkreisfinder.de - Die Suchmaschine für Lokales und Events
