I have just updated two contributions (will announce it when they are in the contrib demobrowser) and it made me think about why so few contributions have been updated to the new contrib infrastructure. I think that the qooxdoo team should invest some more time into this to get more contrib authors on board.
- the documentation at http://qooxdoo.org/contrib is not up-to-date. The information on the new infrastructure is in the manual (http://manual.qooxdoo.org/3.5.x/pages/development/contrib.html). However, this is quite hard to find and will not show up when you search "qooxdoo contrib" on google, for example. - I found the process of having to clone the registry, apply changes and create a pull request quite complicated. Probably it will be much quicker and easier the next time, but it seems to me that this will scare off newcomers. In particular, having to create a checksum manually seemed to be strange. - Keeping redundant information in three different places (contrib wiki, repository Manifest, registry manifest) not only violates the DRY principle :-) but also is cumbersome and error-prone. Ideally, all information on the contrib would be kept in one place - the location of the specific version of the published contrib. From this info, all other info can be generated (contrib catalog, demo, registry, etc.). I understand if there are technical obstacles to this, but welcome if the redundancy could be reduced. NPM is a perfect example how to solve the versioning, dependency, discovery, and publication problems. I know that the current solution is a very flexible one that allows to integrate contribs from very different sources (github, sourceforge, ...), and you have thought long and hard about it. But I do think you need to supply more automation tools to the authors - through the generator or a web application. I've seen in the qooxdoo repo that a web UI is in planning - any info on the ETA? Finally, I think some active curation would create more value to the whole contrib infrastructure - there is author info in the contribs - why don't you write to authors of the outdated contribs and invite them to update their contribution to the current qooxdoo version - that wasn't hard (almost no changes except changing #asset to @asset)... My two cents ... any thoughts? Christian -- View this message in context: http://qooxdoo.678.n2.nabble.com/contrib-2-0-infrastructure-tp7585559.html Sent from the qooxdoo mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book "Graph Databases" is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/NeoTech _______________________________________________ qooxdoo-devel mailing list qooxdoo-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/qooxdoo-devel
