On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 12:55 PM Sebastian Zarnekow <
[email protected]> wrote:

> An attempt to encourage the existing community to make a decision based on
> facts is put aside in favor of baseless claims about contributors who will
> do fixes on a project with millions of lines of code *on the phone* *on a
> bus* is far from helpful.
>

You saying it's baseless doesn't mean it is. Mind you, it has happened to
me several times to make GitHub edits on the phone, in a bus. And those
contributions were accepted by the project. Yet another anecdote for sure,
but definitely not baseless.

There must be more to this exercise apart from the *fork on Github* culture
> to attract new people. A contribution to a complex software system is not
> encouraged or hindered by the location of the Github Repository. It's
> encouraged or discouraged by the way we communicate with each other, how
> other opinions are valued and how we deliver feedback on ideas and
> expressed thoughts.
>

Although that's true communication is important, one can contribute to
GitHub without knowing anything about the culture of the project; just by
applying a workflow that's standard. Then the contributor face the culture
during reviews and so on. The location and initial workflow is more
important than anything else for a new contributor, it's the very 1st thing
they face and have to deal with, before receiving any communication.


> Too often I've seen tickets being ignored or comments being made of the
> shape: Go on, debug yourself (in the same spirit as the subtext in "I don't
> think the Platform as a project has prevented anyone interested from
> promoting Oomph" which to me reads as "Go on, write the contribution guide
> yourself") .
>

You read the subtext well. And what should be the answer then? "Yes sire,
I'll do whatever you want and change my priorities just for you despite the
fact that neither I or my employer are not a all interested in it and that
you're totally capable of doing the change yourself and aware that it's
totally allowed to you as a committer"? At some point, it's too easy to put
the responsibility on some people not doing things when one has all the
capabilities of doing it themselves. People who want thing to change one
way or the other have to invest in making this happen. It's how community
open-source works and the only way it scales.

While we discuss community growth, then so be it.
Ed, Sebastian, please improve the contribution guide, please create the
1-click Oomph provisioning... Why didn't you as committers/contributors do
it already? Go figure...
(I hope you realize how annoying that sounds - that's an intentional
emotion experiment, not the style I really like to write, but the style I
read too often to remain patient)

Just from looking at https://github.com/eclipse/eclipse.platform.runtime
> and its 16 stars and 30something forks should tell us that the source
> hosting itself is not the reason why people do or do not contribute to open
> source.
>

You picked the example that suits your answer. Picking
https://github.com/eclipse/eclipse.jdt.core with 198 stars and 127 forks
can bring different conclusions.

I'm not saying that I have a solution for the underlying problems either.
> So instead of putting effort into a large migration of builds etc just
> because, we should analyse the status quo and figure out, how we want to
> work in the future and the impact of that workflow on the values of Eclipse
> open source community (trustworthiness, IP checked, etc).
>

That's again something that the Eclipse Foundation itself has clarified:
developing Eclipse projects on GitHub allows to keep the same level of
conformance to the Eclipse Development Process as running it on Gerrit. So
it's not about "values", this was clarified, it's really a matter of
deciding which subset of the software development world we want to target
as potential contributors.

To add a little grain of constructive feedback here and picking up Rolfs
> remarks:
> Just looking at the readme on
> https://github.com/eclipse/eclipse.platform.runtime - the descrption "How
> to contribute" is awefully complex compared to a single Oomph Setup link.
> Maybe, just maybe a rework of that one and a few of the other suggestions
> Rolf made, would be more bang for the buck in the short term and give
> enough time to prepare processes, tools and the like for a potential move
> to Github or Gitlab or whatever.
>

Good idea. I'm sorry I have to write it although it looks like those are
forbidden words, but maybe you can contribute this improvement?
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