Richard Braman wrote:
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.
Here's how it works:
One has to be a committer to directly change the code.
One may be invited to become a committer if contributes a number of
non-trivial, consistently exemplary patches.
Exemplary patches:
1. are easy for a committer to apply;
2. fix one thing;
3. fix it well;
4. are well formatted, using Sun's coding conventions
5. are well documented, with Javadoc for all non-private items
6. pass all existing unit tests
7. includes new unit tests
8. etc.
An exemplary patch is thus something that a committer can commit with
little hesitation. It follows that exemplary patches will be committed
quickly. Lesser patches are likely to languish.
For example, a committer might be reluctant to take on a poorly
constructed patch for a bug that only affects niche users, since it may
take a lot of time to turn it into code worthy of committing.
Most committers are already doing as much as they can to help the
project. The trick is not to get them committers to do more work, but
for others to do more work for the committers, and,eventually, to get
more committers.
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.
If you think these should move, don't just complain: file a bug, make
your case, submit a patch, etc. The website is part of the source and
is governed by the same process.
Doug
