See response inline. > > As I have nothing against a mentor program, nor something in favor of > one, I think it should be done right from the 1st day. And to be in > right it has to be open, by all means. Restricted lists, private > discussions, etc. have no place in OSS projects. If you don't have > access to the wiki to document your progress, pls request an account. > If anything is happening or happens, it should happen in the > respective list (doc, web, internals, pecl) and publicly. >
Thanks for that and we aren't talking about a "restricted" list but a different mailing list where newcomers could browse freely and ask all sorts of questions that might or might not have their place on the internals list. Moreover, before spending time creating all the pages, I'm validating the idea by talking to people and trying to get things going. If an interest is shown, I'll be glad to create any wiki page you want me to create however, until the idea is validated, I'm not going to create a ghost-wiki page that might end up dieing. > My doubts are more (like this thread shows) about the lack of will to > contribute (to wish something is not necessary a will). Mentors does > not or cannot create extra time in contributors days either :). To > guide the contributors through the php project is only a very small > part of the actual work, and could be explain better in our > docs/wiki/sites. > Agreed. > One immediate step could be to create a 'contribute' page, > www.php.net/contribute. This page should explain the various areas one > could contribute (docs, tests, core, pecl, etc.) and how to get in > touch with the responsible developers. Maybe with a link to an issue > in the bug tracker for a given todo, or in a wiki doc (for a verbose > description). > See Pierre, that's where I believe we are doing things wrong. We already have all our infrastructure to report bugs, create wiki pages, send emails. The goal of the program is to create something more personal, something more interactive than just sending everyone to read the manual. I do however agree that we need to have some initial steps created (ala contribute page you suggested). Sure some contributors might not have extra time in their day and that's exactly why I precisely mentioned [IDEA] in the subject. Before going on a mad documentation trip, I want to see who's interested in contributing. I've received a bunch of emails from people that want to help with the core but without volunteer-mentors, there's only so much that can be done (links to the wiki, docs, books to read etc.). The idea behind this whole thing Pierre is not to attack anyone or to denigrate the work of the core team but rather to help our various communities talk together. By various communities, I mean from "core devs" to "wordpress developers". There are a lot of developers out there that have never even been remotely interested in contributing to PHP because of the tedious process of learning how to write "Zend-C". Either way, I think you are right and this needs to be open. Before time is invested into making this properly opened, I'd like to validate the idea. If anyone is interested in starting a few "contributing" pages on the wiki and whatnot then nothing stops them or you from doing it. It is open source, let ideas flourish. Back to the main subject of discussion: Are you interested in being a volunteer-mentor? -- David Coallier -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
