Gunnar Wagenknecht wrote on 07/18/2013 05:01:50 AM:
> Too much of the platform is still
> dominated and controlled too strictly by that one single company.
> Contributions got turned away because of the "lack of resources"
> argument and associated maintenance costs long term. To some point
> those arguments aren't completely invalid. I'm at a point of being
> resigned when it comes to contributing to the platform.
This statement worries me more than everything else that has been written
in this thread. It makes sense that there are very few committers who are
focused on the requirements of the direct Eclipse user base. There are few
people with the motivation to even gather feedback on the pain points of
using a free tool, let alone spending significant time addressing them. I
believe the main focus for most current committers is:
1) Stuff *they* (or their employer) want to focus on
2) Enabling other contributors to help *them* fix the problems they want
to see fixed
I think this is one of Doug's key points, that working to enable more
contributors is the only scalable solution. Imagine someone spent the time
to gather a list of the "top 5" most pressing problems/enhancement
requests. Maybe the current committers can take this list and fix 1 or 2
of them between their other priorities. Well, next year there will be a
new list, and more requests, and still no more people to work on them. It
will not result in a dramatic transformation of the perception or
trajectory of Eclipse as an IDE.
However Gunnar's comment says we are even failing on enabling
contributors, which vexes me. I actually thought we had made improvements
on that in the past couple of years. The Foundation and many committers
have been working to reduce barriers to contribution in any way possible.
Switching to Git, moving the build to Maven/Tycho, adopting Gerrit, and
holding dedicated patch review days are a few of the things committers
have been doing. From the statistics it looks like we are even starting to
see results on this. Ohloh metrics have shown a stable or even slight
upwards trend in the number of Platform contributors in the past couple of
years [1]. JDT core and SWT, historically the two components with the
toughest standards for accepting committers, have both seen committers
from new companies this year. Platform UI, which is in a position to
address many of the preference problems described here, has THIRTY NINE
committers. I don't doubt there are still barriers, but it looks like at
least some people are managing to overcome them and bring their
contributions into the platform.
Personally most the time I used to spend directly fixing user reported
problems, I now spend reviewing patches and trying to enable others to
contribute fixes instead. If successful, this has a multiplier effect that
grows the base of people capable of contributing and is, I think, the best
use of the limited committer resources we have available. So don't tell me
what you want to see fixed. Tell me how I can help you to fix them.
John
[1] https://www.ohloh.net/p/eclipse/factoids#FactoidTeamSizeVeryLarge
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