Hi Guys
First of all it's great to see and read that people are reading what we are writing ;-) Lowering the effort to start contributing has consumed most of the last year for me. I think we are now in a pretty good state with FlexJS All I have been doing for the last few weeks was setting the path to make contributing documentation easier. This has also been one of my greatest itches. That's why I started tackling that problem. Now I think we are in a state where we need to decide if we continue down that path, but stuff like this should not be decided only by the handful of people currently actively working on the project alone. The number of things we could need is big and everyone who's currently contributing is working on "his greatest itches", because naturally he wants those things done and therefore the motivation to solve them is biggest. But as the number of people working on FlexJS is very limited, so is the speed of our progress. So if you are waiting for a feature that we are not working on, how about starting to work on it yourself. We will be happy to help you in your efforts. Just as an example. I have absolutely no idea how the compiler works internally, even if I'm working a lot on it, so you don't have to understand the whole thing in order to start contributing :-) Please come forward and tell us how we can improve that would help you guys to start contributing again. And even communication on this list is a valuable form of contribution. Especially "I agree", "I disagree" messages would give an impression of interest, consent and community, which is definitely highly motivating from my point of view. I personally have gotten from this thread that one of the biggest itches of you guys seem to be having is the lack of documentation and I will try to put my efforts into this, as now providing the infrastructure for this is finished or at least has reached a big milestone from my point of view. Eventually it would be good for us to Define features we all would like to see in Jira and prioritize them in a way that we can draw the 1.0.0 line. It definitely won't be the order in which they are handled and we definitely won't have a fixed release-date, but it would make progress more visible and it could motivate people to get their hands dirty and start working on one of those issues. The more people help, the sooner we will reach the 1.0.0 What do you think? (yes even Alex ... I guess you can come out now ;-) Chris ________________________________ Von: Vulcansoft <m...@vulcansoft.com> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 13. Oktober 2016 23:20:28 An: dev@flex.apache.org Betreff: Re: [Discuss] What's keeping the others from participating? Hi Christopher, well, I’ve been silent on this mailing list, but I’m reading it very carefully. So here are my 2 cents as a non-contributor: > - lack of interest? No. I for my part cannot wait for FlexJS to become reality. Just had a job interview and they were all ears when I told them about the upcoming FlexJS so they can move over their AS3/Flex base! But they also wanted to know when FlexJS will be ready for prime time and I had no idea what to tell them. I realize this is open source and there’s no roadmap, but this also complicates the decision making process for those who would want to use FlexJS and then end up using something like TypeScript just to be on the safe side. > - that you think this is too much rocket-science? / It's too complicated to > contribute Probably. I don’t have any experience with frameworks or compilers so I cannot help out there. Installed the pre-release versions of FlexJS to write something and give feedback, but quickly realized that I don’t even know where to start without documentation and gave up. Even though I’ve followed this mailing list for many months now, I cannot even tell approximately at what point it is. Like a todo list and what’s-been-done list somewhere. Finally: you guys certainly do a terrific job and it’s very, very much appreciated! Just try to communicate with the outside world more and let them know what great a job you’re doing. Christian > On Oct 13, 2016, at 8:08 AM, Christofer Dutz <christofer.d...@c-ware.de> > wrote: > > Hi guys, > > > I just wanted to take the opportunity to ask you what's keeping you from > participating in any discussions here on the list and on contributing > anything else. > > > Apache Flex currently has the 10th largest committer base in the ASF, but > currently it feels like there is only 4-5 people still active on this > project. Having this in-diversity in discussions is starting to get more and > more tiresome as I almost know the responses which are going to come if I > post something. I think most of the time I could start writing the reply for > the expected response right away so I don't have to do it later. > > > Are we doing something wrong? > > > What's keeping all of you stay silent? > > > Is is: > > - lack of interest? > > - lack of time? > > - that you think this is too much rocket-science? / It's too complicated to > contribute > > - a consumer attitude that you just want to know what others are doing for > you? > > > Apache is all about community, but for me this doesn't feel much like a > community anymore. Sometimes I think we could rename dev@flex.apache.org to > a...@flex.apache.org as he is definitely the most active poster. Discussing > stuff with the project sort of feels more and more like "If I want to change > something, I'll take it to the list and discuss it with Alex first". It > shouldn't be that way. > > > Is is just us 4-5 people and we simply have to live with it, or can we do > anything to get you guys back on board? > > > For the last more-than-a-year I have been working exclusively on trying to > lower the complexity to contribute in order to get more people on board. It > seems that effort was a waste of time. Please prove me wrong. > > > @Alex: I would like to kindly ask you to please refrain from responding right > away and let at least a hand full of others respond first. I would like to > see if this eventually prevents the "someone else is taking care of it for > me" effect. > > > Chris >
