Eric Kow wrote:
Dear Haskellers,
I would like to take an informal poll for the purposes of darcs
recruitment. Could you please complete this sentence for me?
"I would contribute to darcs if only..."
The answers I am most interested in hearing go beyond "... I had more
time". For instance, if you are contributing to other Haskell/volunteer
projects, why are you contributing more to them, rather than darcs?
...I knew how to help (and had the time).
The You Too Can Hack on Darcs blog series is a really good idea. One
problem many open-source projects suffer from is it not being apparent
how a new hacker would even begin to start working. An overview of how
the project is set up along with some notice about how malleable the
different parts are goes a long way.
It can also be helpful to take some RFI and walk through implementing
the change, testing that it hasn't broken anything, and sending the
patch (don't forget this step :). A follow on about getting ideas from
the bug tracker is also good. Sometimes hands-on documentation is the
best kind. Also documenting how a ninja developer could drop in, fix
some things, and leave before anyone noticed is a good way to snare the
folks who'd like to help a little but don't want to get dragged into
being a regular developer (yet). Try-before-you-buy contributing is one
of the best ways to get regular developers.
...I knew you needed help (and had the time).
This is an image thing, but until the recent announcement of dayjob
syndrome I was under the impression that darcs was rumbling along just
fine. The wiki has a developers' FAQ and all, but the overall image is
that darcs is stable and doing fine (and in my experience it is). Part
of the reason I haven't contributed was that I've never thought about
it-- and that's the problem. Silly as it sounds, even people who work on
open-source code all the time don't always think about whether a project
they use every day could use their support. And if it works just fine,
they don't even have the impetus of wanting to fix it.
I think it'd be good if the YTCHoD blog were more long lived than just
something to gain developers now. A community blog for everyone hacking
on darcs might help to demonstrate:
(a) that there's a community of humans behind the software,
[This is another thing that, silly as it sounds, people often forget
about. For a humorous but all too true discussion of why, cf
<http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html>.]
(b) that they're nice folks who'd welcome new developers,
[In the corporate world people will take a job for the money, but they
stay (or leave) for the people. In open-source they may come for the
code, but it's the community that keeps them around (or scares them off).]
(c) and that there are specific tractable problems they have that
non-developers could help with.
[Bug trackers are an excellent source of tasks for active developers to
use so things don't get lost, but they're awful for new developers. For
someone just joining the project it's rarely clear how important a task
is, how hard, or how far reaching its consequences (or whether someone's
already working on it). Good trackers have fields to note these things,
but the notes are engineered for active developers; the extent to which
those notes are even used or accurate varies wildly from project to
project. Hence, having a clear discussion about what things really are
important and how much they interact with everything else is a great boon.]
--
Live well,
~wren
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