Hi, On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 9:06 PM, Karl Wright <daddy...@gmail.com> wrote: > (a) what we are still missing as far as incubator graduation is concerned
There's still quite a bit to be done for community diversity. The drive to get new committers in is definitely a step in the right direction, but we'll need to follow up on that to make keep at least some of the new people as active members of the community. This is an area where mentors should be able to help (I'll try to increase my involvement here). To put things in perspective, since the beginning of this year Karl has made over 96% of all ManifoldCF commits. This makes the bus factor [1] of the project pretty high, and suggests that a more diverse development community is needed. The solution is not to have Karl commit less, but to get other people to more actively join the fun. The situation here is roughly similar to what we experienced during the incubation of Apache Tika. In the last year before graduation (2008) I was responsible for about 87% of all commits, which raised similar concerns about diversity [2]. The solution then was to graduate into a Lucene subproject instead of a full TLP, so that the larger project could still provide oversight and continuity in case things went wrong. Since then Lucene has shed out most subprojects to avoid being too large to manage, and by the time Tika in 2010 became a TLP by itself my share of all commits had shrunk to a still high but much more reasonable 62%. Today I'm still the most active committer, but my share of all the activity is down to 44%. I'd like to see ManifoldCF follow a similar trajectory. Graduating into a Lucene subproject is probably out of the question given the structural changes in Lucene, so for now my recommendation would be to remain in the Incubator until the community balance gets better. Some of the key things I did in Tika to help reduce my central role there were to lower the barriers of entry by working on things like the Getting Started page [3] and adding tools like the runnable tika-app jar and the simple GUI interface that make it trivially easy for someone to get started using Tika. The Build and Deploy guide in ManifoldCF [4] and the start.jar mechanism are good steps in this direction, but I think we could streamline quite a few of those steps. As Tommaso and others already mentioned, things like a simpler build process and a nicer UI can be quite useful. These are things that don't usually mean much to people already familiar to the system, but for potential new users and contributors with a short attention span they matter a lot. Thus I think these are areas that we should try to focus on in near future. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor [2] http://markmail.org/message/bvqs2zv762fmlyv5 [3] http://tika.apache.org/0.9/gettingstarted.html [4] http://incubator.apache.org/connectors/how-to-build-and-deploy.html BR, Jukka Zitting
