no, the barrier is not high. Yes, it is too high for many, many potential contributors.
No it isn't, I think you are confusing the fact that people don't generally like to contribute documentation. Instead of lowering the barriers for "potential contributors", we need to do a better job of creating an atmosphere where a non-committer knows that a patch submission will not sit in Bugzilla for months before being "discovered".
I would tend to agree with your rant and your suggestion on how to earn karma.
However, committers on individual projects are using their own CVS modules to create copies of these documents. We on the James project have done this with a few pages and link to some Jakarta or Apache website pages depending on which we think is best written/most updated. So, I don't see the issue as people not wanting to write documentation, just individuals taking the path of least resistance.
Honestly, I'm curious as to how much authority the individual PMCs should be exercising to define these processes. Even a process as simple as creating an account for a first time creator can have variations. This is a silly example, but the Jakarta page says to cc this request to pmc@, while we at James are cc'ing [EMAIL PROTECTED] Also the James project might want to specify that "lazy" consensus for a new committer vote is waiting 72 hours from the time the vote is called. Other projects may have this a different time, or even just think the James project is making a mountain out of a mole hill and should get over themselves.
Isn't to some extent these processes decisions up to the PMC? Do we really have so many variations that the board (or members or whoever) need to decide what to centralize and unify?
-- Serge Knystautas President Lokitech >> software . strategy . design >> http://www.lokitech.com p. 301.656.5501 e. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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