On Mon, Dec 24, 2018 at 5:21 PM Karl Heinz Marbaise <khmarba...@gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi Mickael, > Hi, I have to summarize this simply. > This is no lack of interest in any kind. It is simply a lack of time of > the committers...cause there is very limited number of committers... > I understand that, and I hope I was explicit enough when I was talking about the *perception* of contributions receiving low interest, as opposed to the reality you mention which is about lack of resources compared to backlog. In this case, some time ago, when Eclipse was in a similar position, we did collectively decide to make external contributions higher priority than our own work for a few months. This did have a very positive impact in growing the community, recruiting more developers, more committers, and also changing the mindset of most current committers to think more and more about incoming contributors and plan some time for the reviews, and prioritize community over development in some cases; because ultimately, the community makes the project alive more than its feature set. > > It also seems like reviewing and testing PRs is not trivial, and that > more > > automation could help developers to trust incoming changes and deal with > > reviews. > > What kind of ideas do you have? To be honest reviewing a PR takes time > and based on my experience no (other) automation will help there..but If > you have ideas please share them... > I was confused about how automated tests are running or not. If I look at https://github.com/apache/maven/pull/194 , I do not see any build/test report on the issue. I imagine this requires someone to manually trigger the tests, doesn't it? If it is so, then it could be one step to remove on the review process, and the automated build feedback would allow contributors to fix their PRs by themselves before wasting time of a reviewer. > > This goes by having a mindset that makes core developers main task to > grow > > the community rather than fixing bugs or adding features. > > That contradicts some of the feedback we got, cause we get feedback > saying why does it take so long to fix a bug etc... > I know that. It's also something we hear often in Eclipse and I guess something the majority of serious OSS projects face often. But it's OSS, people who need a fix should be ready to invest in it; and someone who's finding a bug long to fix is actually someone that can be turned as a contributor for their own bug ;) The user community is very big but unfortunately the people who are > willing to help is not that big... > Same as above ;) > That said, I think Maven already enables some important success criteria, > > like being on GitHub. So I'm confident things can and will improve to > grow > > the community. > > Over the time it already evolved/grown in several aspects. Maybe not in > the speed we wish it had... > But it takes time... > I have good hope it's worth it ;) -- Mickael Istria Eclipse IDE <https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/eclipse-packages/> developer, for Red Hat Developers <https://developers.redhat.com/>
