I agree that centralized SCM is not an issue preventing participation by developers.
Other issues are much more critical. PythonCAD is a moderately complex application. I am a casual developer just learning Python. One major barrier to my participation is simply figuring out how the code is architected so that I can understand where to make changes and/or additions. I spent a bunch of hours on this, submitted some patches for R36, but still don't know how to get started implementing things. For example: Implementing Architectural dimensions (Feet, inches and fractions). I sent Art some Python code to convert decimal feet to Arch dims, but I can't yet figure out how to integrate that code into PythonCAD... I'd also like to add scrollbars to the drawing area, but there's a huge learning curve to the GTK toolkit, and I don't really understand how PythonCAD draws into the drawing area enough to understand how implementing scrolling would affect that. More detailed code documentation and a detailed spec of the software architecture would be very helpful. Like: exactly what methods in what objects are called when a user clicks a button to do something. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eric Wilhelm Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2007 4:07 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PythonCAD] Post R36 plans # from Art Haas # on Thursday 24 May 2007 11:59 am: >One thing I want to do, and I've said it before, is to replace the >centralized Subversion repository with a distributed SCM. I have some doubts that this will make that big of a difference to contributors. That's just my take on it. I think SCM is fairly minor among the number of factors in open-source community building. While there's no science to it, I think the time/money, skill, and motivation factors are more significant. What is the barrier-to-entry for developers and what audience (i.e. profession) are they in? --Eric _______________________________________________ PythonCAD mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythoncad
