Hi everybody,
[email protected] schrieb:
Thorsten Scherler <[email protected]> schrieb am
16.01.2009 13:53:06:
El vie, 16-01-2009 a las 10:40 +0100,
[email protected] escribió:
[…]
The real problem is that we have promising candidates for new committers
but we are failing to give the last helping hand.
I agree that we should rather improve the community building efforts of
the Lenya project than encourage an external community.
The goal of the ASF is to create software in a collaborative way. It
provides us with the necessary infrastructure. The problem is IMO that
many contributors have the feeling that (a) becoming a committer is way
out of their reach and (b) contributing (see [1]) is too complicated. We
have to work on these issues.
Just have a look at the drupal Community. They have a little core
development team and a big community developing modules
http://www.ohloh.net/p?q=drupal They are very sucessful.
From what I heard this approach is also the biggest weakness of
projects like Typo3 and Drupal. The core team cannot provide any
guarantee or even support for the external modules. Many users have
serious issues when updating the core because the modules work only with
particular versions. The ASF projects are characterized by "[…] a desire
to create high quality software that leads the way in its field" [2]. I
would much prefer to have a strong community of individuals who stand
behind this idea, and participate in the project itself by maintaining
their modules as contributors and, after a short period of making
theirselves familiar with the ASF way and checking out if it fits their
attitude, as committers.
Please don't misunderstand me – I would be very glad about externally
managed modules if they're backed by commercial interest or another form
of committment, if donating them to the ASF is not an option or the
module is not generic enough for general use.
BTW, a very important point is the ratio between community size and size
of the code base. Should we accept modules as soon as there is
committment to maintain them? In this case, we also have to be ready to
remove them when the maintenance stops, which raises the question of
backwards compatibility.
I think the new modules concept of lenya 2.0 ist excellent, and it's a
great chance to get a big community.
I agree that it would be wonderful to have more modules that are driven
by "outsiders" however one big problem is that this modules need to be
maintained. I can remember when I worked with different php cms that
most modules are snapshots and not maintained anymore. Not trying to say
that drupal is like this.
Drupal is for me just an example, were the high qualified core contributers
are seperated from
the module developers. I think that's an import point for the success of a
community project.
A module provider has his own little project where he can realize his ideas
and provide it to the community.
A good motivation with a gerat benefit for the community I think.
I agree to these points, and I think all of this should happen in the
ASF environment. But I don't think we have to give different permissions
to "module comitters" and "core committers". The commit list gives
enough visibility to review core commits. I can't remember a single case
where a newbie committer broke the core beyond repair – that's only done
by the senior ones like me :) – or caused serious trust issues. SVN is a
nice place to make mistakes, there's always the version history.
> For good quality, the modules schould be reviewed by the core team.
This is already the case with the contributor/committer model [1].
[…]
If we open a contributor module in svn would you provide patches to fill
it?
Yes I like this idea. Is there a way to get write access to this area after
good contributions ?
Sure, it's called "becoming a committer" :)
(Only to the "own" module area not to the whole repository.)
That would be a role like "lenya module committer".
> I think that could be a useful step before becomming a real lenya
> committer.
I don't think this is necessary (see above).
[1] http://www.apache.org/dev/contributors.html
[2] http://www.apache.org/
-- Andreas
--
Andreas Hartmann, CTO
BeCompany GmbH
http://www.becompany.ch
Tel.: +41 (0) 43 818 57 01
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
