Hi Jan, I'm really glad you want to contribute to Review Board and have been working on doing this. I know a lot of those patches still aren't in and it's frustrating, and I really do apologize. The problem isn't with you. Rather, it's a time issue on my part.
I was considering sending out an e-mail about our status and the fact that we need additional help in specific areas. I may still do that separately, but I'll give the summary here. Basically, we are absolutely swamped. Review Board's user base over the past couple of years has grown considerably, which leads to many feature requests and bugs. Unlike most open source projects, though, it has more of a corporate following than an open source following, which means people who contribute tend to contribute to solve a business need and not because they enjoy working on the project. This leads to a large influx of short-term contributors but very few long-term. Because of this, nobody really sticks around long enough to "own" a particular piece of code, meaning that we have to learn the new code, fully understand it, support it, and maintain it. A good example is Clear Case. I don't know Clear Case. I don't have a long-term license with which to be able to get really familiar with it. The existing Clear Case code we have is complicated and buggy. This makes code reviews hard for me, as I can only make an educated guess as to whether something is being done the correct way, based on limited understanding of how Clear Case works. Since Clear Case is just one small part of Review Board, the focus tends to be on other components. That's not to say that Clear Case is hardly used or anything, or that it's not important, but so is every other component. Likewise, other things sometimes get just as ignored, unfortunately. In an ideal world, we'd be giving every component our full attention. However, our development team is very, very small for a project of this size. Aside from occasional contributors, it consists of two people: David Trowbridge and myself. Now, David and I have a full time job at VMware, leading some large projects that take up a good amount of time themselves. Outside of that, David's fairly busy right now and, while I know he'd like to put more time into the project, he simply can't at the moment. So that leaves me. And I wear many hats: * Lead developer (Review Board, RBTools, website, some additional stuff before too long) * Documentation writer * Support (mailing lists, sometimes IM and IRC and private e-mail) * QA/Test infrastructure developer (testing the product, building our unit test framework (including Selenium tests) and managing our build machines) * Release manager * Student mentor (for Google's Summer of Code, and an upcoming thing this fall) Since there is only one of me, and I'm operating in my "free time" (which is split between a personal life and Review Board -- and Review Board is taking up most of that these days), I can only do one thing at a time. You asked about the project needs. What I really need is to find people who can do some of the tasks above. "Owning" a part of the codebase (handling the support for it, developing it, writing tests, and rewriting the code if need be), helping with support, writing documentation (looking for good doc writers for that part). The other problem of course is finances. It's a fairly expensive project to run, outside of time spent, and we're just barely breaking even. If we had enough money available to the project, perhaps we could hire people to do some of the above. I'm working on ideas for that, but at the moment it's not really an option. So, the best way to be in touch with us is by e-mail. I know you and I are in very different timezones and I'm rarely around when you are, so IM doesn't quite work. I don't use Skype and I feel it has the same problems as IM in this case. The big advantage of e-mail is that more people can get involved and answer questions as well. Right now, I'm working hard to get the new user manual and admin manual done for Review Board 1.5. I'm trying really hard to push that out the door so I can start getting RBTools back in shape. Right now, I'm just simply ignoring RBTools, because I can't have too many distractions from 1.5 or it'll just keep being delayed. I'll be paying a lot more attention to patches and code reviews after that's out the door, and we can start getting things into RBTools and into RB point releases. Christian -- Christian Hammond - chip...@chipx86.com Review Board - http://www.reviewboard.org VMware, Inc. - http://www.vmware.com On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 10:35 AM, Jan Koprowski <jan.koprow...@gmail.com>wrote: > Hi, > > I feel strong need to develop ReviewBoard. I wrote few patches and > from time to time fix something what I found inside RB but ... I still > fill I don't help. I still don't know what is the current needs of > ReviewBoard, in which point of Release project is and what should be > made to release next version faster. Is developer team is close group > of people or this community is open? How I can be in touch with > developers and help with current work? How I can be up to date with > current needs of RB and help with development? Is there any chance to > get mentor from contributor team to work with him (by Skype in > example). > > Greetings from Poland > -- > Jan Koprowski > > -- > Want to help the Review Board project? Donate today at > http://www.reviewboard.org/donate/ > Happy user? Let us know at http://www.reviewboard.org/users/ > -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > reviewboard+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<reviewboard%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/reviewboard?hl=en -- Want to help the Review Board project? Donate today at http://www.reviewboard.org/donate/ Happy user? Let us know at http://www.reviewboard.org/users/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- To unsubscribe from this group, send email to reviewboard+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/reviewboard?hl=en
