Contribution is something I've been thinking about for quite some time because it's interesting how a lot of software is declared "open" but make it not obvious what you can do to help, or at least participate, or just take a glimpse at the code to see if something stands out.
I am a believer that there is a way to structure a project in a way to make it very easy for people with decent experience in broad programming paradigms to jump into looking over your code and propose revisions or question design decisions. That said, I've also been in groups where people only want to write things once and forget it exists and can't handle any criticism and consider any questions asked to them as a waste of time, who will only work on stuff at last moment and won't let anybody help them. The factors I've noticed are: 1. Ease of finding the repositories which you want people to contribute to, and tell them apart from repositories which you don't want people to contribute to, or are irrelevant to the project(often a project is broken down into multiple repositories, and the dependency chain isn't clear). 2. Dependencies: If you ever took a look at a Minix Kernel, you will notice a huge chain of headers including headers including headers, scopes with over 7 variables in them, and nonflat hierarchies which look at multiple include directories, many of which are not even part of the project, eg Minix will look at the system's include directory to decide things rather than figure it out in a standalone way. This means that it is very hard to just take things out of context and understand them without traversing huge dependency chains, this really discourages contribution. 3. Strict coding guidelines: i've seen projects that force you to either use tabs, or only use spaces, or such. These are very harmful to encouraging as many people to participate as possible; we have tools to restructure code you are looking at automatically, but these tools are not very easy to access on all platforms, and need to be configured to your tastes. These tools improve productivity immensely but people need to be told how to use them. 4. Ease of telling "where is the start" "where is the end". Many projects are simply too hard to tell where the start/where the end is, and where the plugins are, etc. Making it clear where the VM start point is, and how the project is structured, how the dependency chain looks like really helps familiarize yourself faster, and lets people jump into contributing faster as they don't feel like they need to learn EVERYTHING before doing anything. ---- My argument is: Let S be the set of all people who are aware of Pharo's existence who have enough programming experience to be relevant to possibly contributing. Let C be the set of all the people in S who have an interest in contributing to Pharo, or are willing to contribute to Pharo if you were to come up to them and ask them to sit next to you and work on it with you. eg they have the time/resources but don't feel like they go out of their way to get started. Let N be the set of all the people in C who are actually contributing or will contribute to Pharo at some point. There exists a way to structure the project under a philosophy which, the closer you come to it, the more set N decreases, that is, if the philosophy is executed perfectly, there are no people who are capable of contributing something relevant, who have not done so or will never do so. I am not quite sure what the exhaustive philosophy is, but I suspect the factors up front play a part in it. -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Intro-to-Microsoft-COM-for-Smalltalkers-tp4917738p4917793.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
