Hi, In yesterday's community meeting we talked a bit about how to best manage code under contrib/ directory:
<https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn/tree/master/contrib> We agreed that code going there does not necessarily need to go through our usual pretty strict review process. Accepting things without some review, however, would definitely bite us back later. Getting more people involved in maintaining "contrib/" would be good, as the brain-cycles of the core developers are fairly limited. We discussed several options for encouraging participation from new people: 1) Allow GitHub pull requests for "contrib/" This is the least invasive approach. We would document this new policy in GitHub, Trac and the Git repository. This would lower the barrier for participation somewhat. Things under "contrib/" would still be considered "official" OpenVPN code. 2) Move "contrib/" to a separate "openvpn-contrib" Git repository Everything under "contrib/" would be in a single Git repository. Code in that repository would be less "official" than for option #1. 3) Create a separate Git repository for each contributed project In this model each contributed feature would become its own Git repository. We've split things out of the main repository before and the results have been a bit mixed. The OpenVPN GUI project has been a big success with several developers contributing significant amounts of code: <https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn-gui/graphs/contributors> EasyRSA 3 has been surprisingly successful despite the fact that it has not yet even become the "official" EasyRSA version: <https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa/graphs/contributors> The openvpn-build cross-compile buildsystem project has been moderately successful, even though there are only a few regular contributors: <https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn-build/graphs/contributors> The EasyRSA 2 project could be considered a failure: <https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa-old/graphs/contributors> It was noted in the meeting, however, that EasyRSA 2 is mature and probably there's not that much need to fix it. This could partly explain why there have been very few contributions to EasyRSA 2. --- We do not wish to "drop the ball" on code under "contrib/". We would also like to avoid the fate of the OpenVPN RADIUS plugin, which has been forked several times in a row by individuals, leaving users with no idea of which version is the least buggy one. Any thoughts on which of these options would be best if the goal is to encourage participation in developing code under "contrib/"? Are there other approaches which we have overlooked? -- Samuli Seppänen Community Manager OpenVPN Technologies, Inc irc freenode net: mattock ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Openvpn-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openvpn-devel
