On Thu, 3 Sep 2015, John D. Ament wrote:
I'm adding some shepherd notes for ODF Toolkit. I think my main concern is lack of mentor participation on the project. Rob Weir (I swear every time I type his name I type the d) has taken a mentor role on the project, but doesn't seem to be in podlings.xml. I'm not too worried about this, but can we add him to podlings.xml (if so, I'll add him)?
If Rob is happy to take on the formal mentor role, I'd be in favour of adding him in as an official mentor
In terms of the codebase, I've heard rumours that there's a huge pile of fixes an enhancements sitting in a non-ASF git repo, waiting for the sign-off to bring it back. Bringing that in would probably help, but there is the issue that all of this code was developed externally and not here, which doesn't help with community development.
If there's some energy for community development, I would suggest people put together a list of "easier" things that could be fixed / contributed. Then, importantly, existing committers should resist the temptation to do them! If there's a list of easier tasks, then new community members (of which we've had the odd volunteer over the last year) can have something to get started with, to get them into the project and the codebase.
If there's coding energy, I'd suggest working on an implementation of the Apache POI Spreadsheet APIs. Currently, the spreadsheet components are by far the most popular areas of POI, and there's a fairly general UserModel SS interface across .xls and .xlsx. While it won't be easy to implement all of that for ODF, there's probably enough in common between all 3 spreadsheet formats that the key parts could be done. With that in place, it becomes a 2 line change for existing POI users to try out ODFToolkit. That could then help drive interest and users. There are also a few new POI committers who might (I haven't asked them!) be interested in helping out a little bit with this too.
Nick
