On 02/10/2007, Alan Burlison <Alan.Burlison at sun.com> wrote: > Shawn Walker wrote: > > > Considering the excruciatingly slow process of making contributions to > > some of the projects here, I don't see what would motivate folks. > > And that comes straight back to resourcing again. > > > It seems relevant to me that the projects with the lowest barriers to > > contribution (such as the spec files repository that the desktop and > > sfw communities appear to share) appear to have the highest number of > > external contributions. > > So how do you explain the almost total lack of response to the defect > management stuff, the same lack of response to the website restructuring > proposals I put out? And what about the appallingly abusive email
Pick a possibility: 1) Contributors that have contributed in the past aren't motivated due to lack of Sun resources that are (perceived???) as being necessary to make contributions 2) New contributors are scared away and don't know how to contribute since almost none of the projects or communities have a simple "How to contribute" page 3) Contributors see all sorts of decisions made off-line and then announced on the lists by Sun folks which leads them to believe that their voice wouldn't matter anyway since they weren't asked to begin with 4) No one but Sun folks (as far as I know) has the ability to really help maintain or manage the opensolaris.org website since it appears to require access to Sun private resources > thread that appeared on sysadmin-discuss about the new packaging system? > Again, proposals for the packaging have been available for some > considerable time, and the people who are now being so abusive didn't > see fit to comment at the time. Sorry, but in the case of ips, I never saw a proposal. I saw a few blog posts and emails fly here and there about interesting concepts around packaging and then one day, "poof!" it was on opensolaris.org and it had apparently been in development for some time already. If you want to know why folks were upset, just go back to the lack of communication about what was happening. > I agree with Keith on one thing - Sun engineers are not some sort of > private development team that is at the beck and call of random people > who subscribe to sundry opensolaris.org lists. In all the other > communities I've been a member of, having your voice listened to is a > privilege, not a right, and it's a privilege that's earned in proportion > to the contribution level, not volume level. That's all well and good to say except that a large number of operations right now *require* Sun resources. It's really frustrating for you to accuse community members of not wanting to contribute or become involved whenever the majority of the processes require Sun resources to do anything useful at all. As an example, when the project first started, I posted some trivial patches that changed *comments in code* and it was *months* before they were ever integrated. Or, as another example, I posted a webrev week or so ago that should fix a segmentation fault in exrecover that has been around since SunOS 3.5 (probably). I posted the webrev on opensolaris-code and received *one* actual review comment from someone. That person was not even associated with Sun. The week after I finished my changes and posted two more webrevs and still have never seen a comment from anyone about the changes. So now, I'm left waiting on *Sun* resources for my contribution to do anything at all. Yes, I'm aware of the hg transition, etc. -- that will help. But in the meantime, the contribution barrier is high in terms of resources, poor to little documentation of the process to contribute, and a lack of communication sometimes from communities. I apologise in advance to all the sponsors and others who have helped me, but it isn't incredibly motivating to contribute when the smallest contributions take *weeks* or *months* to actually be reviewed, used, or accepted. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. " --Donald Knuth
