Hi, On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 6:29 PM, Tom Hobbs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The incentive I had for starting this is my (mistaken?) belief that the > "River community as a whole" (whatever that is) was aimless with each > individual wanting to scratch their own itch and there being no real > shared goal.
My impression is more that people aren't currently even scratching their itches. It's fine to talk about what should be done, but without someone actually doing the things nothing will happen. > I don't want to come across as being defensive. I'm, if not happy then > prepared, to be corrected. My apologies if my tone was offensive. > But as for the three tasks I called people into action over; yes I did do > them, but no I didn't post about them. Perhaps I should have. OK, great! In open source things typically only exist once you've shared them. >> What's in that for me? Increased adoption only brings me indirect >> benefits in terms of increased project activity, but it won't help >> with the issues I face today. > > This is the statement I have the most problem with - but again it's > possibly down to my misunderstanding of what the "River Community" is > and wants. To use a tired house builder analogy; if you're standing in > the rain and all you want is a roof over your head, why waste time > having your builders dig a hole in the ground and fill it with concrete? The same analogy could be used to back also my point: You need to have the basics in place (bugs being fixed, improvements implemented, etc.) before you can reach higher (advocacy, roadmap planning, etc.). > That's what goes through my mind when I think about trying to move River > on. We all are facing issues about the code base that directly impact > our immediate problems. So where's the action on those issues? > But is there a step beyond that, beyond the here and now which is the > direction "the community/project" should be taken to salve tomorrow's > itches? That's perfectly valid, and all projects should have those discussions every now and then. I'm just worried that currently there doesn't seem to be too many people in River who'd actually start implementing any of the proposed changes. > I get your point about (and I'm paraphrasing) that if you want to see > some activity then submit some code, don't just shout at people about > the code they should be submitting. But again, what, on a grander > level, is accomplished by a bunch of people sat around only scratching > their own itches? Well that's the beauty of open source. :-) If you look at the code histories of any major open source project you'll notice that the vast majority changes are directly related to some bigger or smaller issues that people who were already using the project were facing. > Should I (or we, or you) care about some grander level or does the > vision not go beyond 'what I'm trying to do today'? It's certainly fine to look at the bigger picture. I'm just trying to point out that IMHO the best way of doing that in a community-driven project is to start from your needs today and tomorrow. An open source project that focuses on solving the problems of other people is not sustainable unless there are external forces driving the effort (for example most company-driven open source projects work that way). > Maybe this just boils down to my own preconceived ideas about what being > involved in an open source project is really like. I look at other > (bigger and more mature project like linux distros and log4j etc) and > there does seem to be an over-reaching direction that people then submit > code to try and reach. That direction is typically achieved by the accepted scope and purpose of the project, not so much by a plan that assigns specific tasks to contributors. The fact that people appear to be working towards a single goal is caused (mostly) by the fact that they are all using the code for the same purposes and facing similar issues that they then want to fix. > "You're suggesting that if people just submitted code to fix their own > individual problems then growth and activity would be more organic. > Then, as more itches are scratched, more people would then use River > because whatever was blocking them before had eventually been fixed > because someone else scratched it (possibly by chance)." > > If that's the case and as a 'community member' I should be scratching my > own itches then I shall now start getting busy getting some patches done > and ready for submission! Of course you're free to do whatever you want here, but if you want results then my recommendation would be to follow this course of action at least for now. In summary, you'll want to be "Creating the Future" instead of "Deciding the Future"! :-) BR, Jukka Zitting