Le 17/09/14 12:35, Pierre Smits a écrit : > RE: but only 2 active committers > > Having such a low number of committers is a great risk for any project > under the ASF umbrella. It affects releasing on time, keeping the issues > list manageable and reactions to user questions.
Actually, the number of active committer is a bit higher than 2 :-) In 2014, we have had commits from 5 committers : - Emmanuel Lecharny with 323 commits - Kiran Ayyagari with 123 commits - Lucas Theesen with 40 commits - Stefan Seelmann with 25 commits - Pierre-Arnaud Marcelot with 2 commits > > All these aspects apply to keeping the project healthy. Because that is > optimal, the users are happy and promote the work and the project. Which > leads to more contributors and you get a greater pool of potentials to > select new committers from. > > This means that you have to advertise. Advertise the product and the > project. There are numerous ways to do that. One of the easiest is > tweeting. Another good way is to have the first page of the projects > website that is not only being descriptive for developers, but also for > users. We have given 6 presentations in last year Ldap Conference, and tweeted a bit about it. But it seems it's not enough. Time is counted, and teh fact that we have a blocker that forbid us to get a production release ready (namely, the JDBM backend is badly broken) is a big donwside. It's now more than one year we are working on a replacement for this backend, with Mavibot, but it's not easy. Last spring, I was in Apache Conference in Boulder, presenting Mavibot. There were *4* people in the room !!! We may be not good at advertizing the project, but at some point, the reality is that we have two big issues with it : - first it's a technology that is not really sexy... In fact, it never was. I mean, unless we invent "LDAP in the cloud", it's the way it is ;-) - second, the code base is quite huge and intimidating. The server itself is 220 Kslocs, the API is 206 Kslocs, Syudio is 196 KSlocs, Mavibot is 22,5 KSlocs and Mina (which we heavily depend on) is 46.5 Kslocs. This is nearly 700 KSlocs... It takes around 2 years to get used to the way the server works, which is quite a lot of time... (After 8 years, there are parts of it I never looked at, to be frank...) So committers are intimidated, something I can understand. > > Have a look at the first page of the Apache CouchDb > http://couchdb.apache.org. I believe the do a great job promoting the > product ánd solicit for help. I am sure the community of that project won't > mind using their approach. We certainly could do better... > > Asking for assistance is not a sin, and diversity in skills (areas and > level) in the community/committers base and PMC keeps the project healthy. We all know about that, and we have no pride here.
