On 02/02/17 09:53, Mariusz Rogowski wrote:
By obvious steps I mean:
1. Make current maintainers stop working on existing issues (if they don't have
time). The biggest issue right now is the project is not attractive to new
developers. Fix that first. What I mean in details e.g. is:
- Close pending (for years) pull requests.
- Prepare nice project readme which mentions contributors are needed and
welcomed.
- Prepare documentation of existing code base. Things like architecture,
languages used, test approach etc.
- Prepare some contribution guidelines.
- Prepare some big picture. Project is quite old, I guess technologies and
architecture chosen might be quite obsolete. Maybe someone should review the
current approach and decide on some bigger targets than fixing single small
issues. E.g. sometimes I feel that that putting address data to some search
engine could get rid of lots of logic in Nominatim code.
Anyway, make the project as attractive as possible for new people. There are
people who want to contribute to open source projects. You could get
contributors from Google Summer of Code, Hacktoberfest, Hackathons and Code
Retreats. But you need to make project look like it's worth ones time.
Firstly nobody can "make current maintainers" do anything - that's not
how open source software works. People work on the things they're
interested in and maintainers do their best to make some sense of the
results and construct a coherent result.
More constructively, if you think those things are important then why
not work on some of them?
It seems like some of them at least are things that would actually be a
good way for somebody who wanted to get involved could get started - as
you explore the code and learn about it you can document what you find
and submit that as a pull request to add new documentation where things
are lacking?
Likewise anybody could write a nice README encouraging people to get
involved and I'm sure the maintainers would be happy to merge it.
Or you could draft some contribution guidelines - those might need to go
round a few cycles of review to fit with the maintainers preferences but
much of the work of writing them could be done by somebody else and
offering something (however minimal) is a constructive way of suggesting
that some guidelines be added that will likely work better than
complaining that they are missing.
Tom
--
Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/
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