Steffen Hoffmann-2 wrote: > > Sure, same thoughts occur to me several times a week lately. While it's > nice to have access for driving development, it's not so nice to end > with just a handful of "power" developers to be in charge for anything. > > I know that's common that 80 % of users contribute 20 % of time, while > 20 % throw in the remaining 80 % for support, bringing others daydreams > into life and, if possible afterwards even hang on and work towards > their own ideas for improvements. And I fear figures are most likely > even worst (more towards 95/5). I'd really love to see more developers > actively maintaining and responding to tickets, at #trac and the > mailing-lists. I'll do my best to continue my work started this year, > but it's at least more fun with more people, both idealistic and > capable, joining in. > >
The 95/5 sounds about right to me as well. A thought occurred to me recently that, “The world doesn’t need yet another trac-hacks plugin.” What I mean is that, for almost every need I have had, there has been an unmaintained plugin that just needs a little bit of work to satisfy the requirement. Towards improving collaboration, if we stick with our goal of merging codebases and packaging plugins together, we might get quite a ways towards having more high quality plugins on t-h.o, and hopefully more people will contribute to those rather than working separately on new plugins that have much of the same functionality as existing plugins. It does feel as if the number of active developers has fallen off in the past 2 years. I wonder why that might be? Steffen Hoffmann-2 wrote: > > > I feel that I still have to learn so much about Python in general, Trac > internals, jQuery, just to name some. But at least collaboration with > you and a few others (osimons at #trac comes to mind instantly) is what > I have, and I'm grateful to have all of you around. Please remind me, if > I don't behave like that. > I’ve learned a lot from Osimons as well, and collaboration with you has always been great, so I don’t think I’ll ever need to do any reminding ;) Each patch is a learning experience, and I find the hardest thing is figuring out whether I’m doing things right. The nice thing about submitting a patch to Trac is that there is great feedback from Christian and Remy. However, there is a lot of less-than-perfect code on trac-hacks, some of it produced by myself, no doubt, and it’s a bit harder to forge ahead without that feedback, but the more code review we do amongst ourselves, the better. Contrary to some recent criticism I’ve seen, I feel that the Trac developer documentation is pretty good, particularly for an open source project. Yet, I think the learning curve is still pretty steep for developing a plugin. I’ve seen some slides from Noah, introducing the Trac API, and then there are plenty of examples on t-h.o, but it’s often difficult to get started. And, as mentioned previously, some of the plugin on t-h.o are doing things not so correct, so one can get led astray. For example, I feel like I had to spend way too long on a ticket from earlier today (1) to determine what was the right way to use the Trac API (and still hoping I got it right, but not entirely sure). I’ve been taking lots of notes with the thought that it might be worthwhile to eventually produce a tutorial on developing a plugin for Trac. Perhaps it would be in a cookbook style, with code snipets on how to do this or that. I haven’t seen anything like that … maybe it would be a good thing? For example, posts like this (2) are really helpful ... but I don't see too many of them around. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, as always! (1) http://trac-hacks.org/ticket/5825 (2) https://pacopablo.com/blog/pacopablo/blog/set-assign-to-drop-down - Ryan -- View this message in context: http://th-users.32086.n3.nabble.com/TracForms-call-for-action-tp1992845p2018317.html Sent from the th-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ th-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.trac-hacks.org/mailman/listinfo/th-users
