From: "Erwan de FERRIERES" <erwan.de-ferrie...@nereide.fr>
Le 27/01/2011 11:50, Scott Gray a écrit :
(With so many messages I don't have a good spot to say my short piece so here
will do)
IMO our problems will only increase with the size of the code base. Every time a new feature is committed you have an additional
potential audience that must be kept happy and our ability to please everybody continues to decrease. Unhappy people don't work
well together so things just keep getting worse.
Solution? Decrease the size of the code base and included features and increase the ability for the community to share
contributions outside of the ASF's repo. Decrease the load on the committers and let the rest of the community put their money
where their mouth is.
Some ideas (feasible or not):
- Pull out all of the themes except one and move each one to google code or wherever if there is someone interested in looking
after each one.
- Then do the same for the bulk of the special purpose apps.
- Separate the framework from the applications.
- Remove any framework features that aren't used by the applications or are of relatively low value and allow them to be dropped
in by users when they need them.
- Perhaps even take another look at the possibility of reducing the dependencies among the core apps and splitting them (I'd
gladly welcome 100 new committers to the humanres app because I have no interest in it).
- Turn the payment and shipping gateway implementations into drop in components along with any other pieces of code that are
suitable for extraction
- Investigate ways to allow plug-in modification of apps and implement
something (anything) that allows it.
Right now we have a gigantic project with a gateway of ~13 active committers (23 total) who have day jobs to worry about along
with reviewing (and fighting about) commits (or just giving up on this responsibility), attempting to improve the project and
taking part in these (mostly pointless discussions) and then keeping the rest of the community happy. Increasing the number of
committers just increases the potential for disagreement and then stagnation so the only other option to reduce the code.
Give control of features and components to people who care about them and then help users find them externally as they need them.
Don't like the direction a feature/component is taking? Fork it and compete.
we've got the apache-extras which could be a great place to put those features and so on. At the moment, there is nothing related
to OFBiz.
http://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/hosting/
Interesting idea!
Also, at Nereide, where I'm working, we've got the addon manager, which we are using for adding features to OFBiz. Maybe we could
give it a try for splitting OFBiz, as you say. I've already been speaking about it. Still open to anyone !
Erwan, could you give us a summary on how it works, from a technical POV? Few
sentences should be enough...
Thanks
Jacques
--
Erwan de FERRIERES
www.nereide.biz
