Quoting Mathias Bauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Moreover, I for myself can't just add something even to the current
developer release without going through some processes (like
requirements analysis, specification etc.). I know and support that this
shouldn't be necessary for "external" developers to the same extent, but
OTOH it should be respected that we need to judge received patches
carefully.
This is usually what Gnome is priased and course for. If anyone do it, he
gets
the credit --even if it breaks everything else. There are fewer barriers of
entry. The question is how can we lower this barriers for new developers.
And BTW, OOo is not the only OS project that suffers from problems with
external contributions. I'm a diligent reader of the Mozilla newsgroups
or mailing lists (developers and users), and there are a lot of
complaints about the slow acceptance of patches also. Moreover, the
general willingness to work on fixes for bugs brought up by the
community seems to be even lower than in case of OOo (though we all know
that in our case it's also possible to improve it :-)).
Yes this is a constant with almost any development project. The Linux kernel
have this issue also Apache and Mozilla to mention a few. We NEED to have this
challenges just to prove we are a mature FLOSS project. Still one of the big
difference is that they are awareness and vehiecles they have to capture train
and incorporate new development. This infrastructure is rather poor for OOo.
This tells me that there is a general problem of complex OS projects
that are mainly done by a core development team. The complexity of the
software (this is different to the complexity/opacitiy of the code
base!) makes if necessary that the development process must be managed
in a way that usually has been developed over years.
As I read some time ago, a project like KOffice that is developed in a
more open way (f.e. because it already started as an open project) also
complains that they get too few developers - maybe this can show us that
this is not a result of missing "opennness", but mainly a result of the
complexity of the software that lets developes shrink back from it?
yes but at the same time, they also have gain a lot from new developments
that
connect to KOffice. Koffice right now is not just the KOffice project but a
series of satelite projects that connect with KOffice.
"Free" developers very often prefer smaller projects, just because it's
easier to enter them, it's easier to understand them, it's easier to add
own contributions (and get the credits :-)). I think that's quite
understandable and of course it's OK, but that should be seen when we
are discussing contributions to OOo (or the lack of them).
Best regards,
Mathias
--
Mathias Bauer - OpenOffice.org Application Framework Project Lead
Please reply to the list only, [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a spam sink.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]