Hi Sean,
Great thoughts, and fantastic to hear that you will devote even more
time to Radiant.
Evan just gave that same speech here at the Ruby Fools 2008 conference
in Copenhagen, and you are right: It is quite inspirational. Git seems
to be the right choice for opening up the contribution process. Now
that Rails is also moving to git, it will gently push a lot of people
in the community to install and learn to use git.
Cheers,
Casper Fabricius
On 31/03/2008, at 19:15, Sean Cribbs wrote:
Radiant users and developers,
Over the weekend I took the time to watch the presentation by Evan
Phoenix about Rubinius that was given at MountainWest RubyConf 2008,
available from confreaks.com (You should watch it, too!). I was
mostly interested in hearing where Rubinius was technically, but his
talk took a very different path in that it focused on how community
is being fostered in the project. His primary points were about
encouraging experimentation and lowering the bar of entry. Some of
his comments really struck home with me, which I'll paraphrase here:
1) A team of 'core committers' tends to stifle debate and
experimentation and marginalizes those who have differing opinions.
This also has the effect of slowing progress on the project when the
core team is unable to participate. If someone is enthusiastic
about contributing, that should be fostered, not squelched by a high
barrier to entry.
2) If a project is open-source, it should be much more open than
most projects actually are. Rubinius gives 'commit bits' after the
first accepted patch. This promotes the feeling of a real community
project, rather than a closed, orchestrated one.
3) Small changes often encompass some of the greatest effort. One
should allow small, incremental changes, no matter how tiny.
4) It's ok to make mistakes. No one, even a 'core committer', is
infallible. Learn from your mistakes, document them, and move on.
The pace of Radiant over the last few months has been slower than
snails. I want to remedy this. I also want to
make amends for the ways that I might have squelched dissent or
artificially slowed the progress of the project through over-
engineering the timeline and smashing potentially transformative
ideas.
To this end, I want to attempt an experiment. The first step is
that I would like to open up the codebase for more experimentation.
I have created a clone of the Radiant Subversion repository on
GitHub (http://github.com/seancribbs/radiant/tree/master). I
encourage everyone who is interested in hacking the Radiant codebase
to fork it, make your changes, and send me pull requests. During
this experiment, we will also be maintaining the traditional SVN
repo and I will push changes to it when necessary. For those who
are familiar with 'git', this should be an opportunity to try out
that cool feature you've always been wanting to build. That said,
I'd like our basic ground-rule to apply, namely, that any patch you
submit should have adequate specs. Although we like to pride
ourselves on our specs, the coverage in Radiant is still not
exhaustive, so any patches that improve the quality and quantity of
specs are also greatly encouraged.
The second step is that I am going to start restructuring my time to
give Radiant the TLC that it needs. I want to be a more nurturant
parent. Earlier this year, John Long asked me to take
responsibility of the programming aspects of the project so that he
could focus on the design. In recent weeks I have found that I am
not logging a full 40-hour week on my projects, and yet Radiant is
not moving forward. Therefore, I will block out one day a week
(Friday) to spend tending to Radiant. During this day each week, I
will be developing the codebase, addressing tickets and patches, and
possibly working on a podcast. I also intend to have "office hours"
on the #radiantcms IRC channel on FreeNode all day (8AM US Central
to about 6PM).
My hope is that both of these steps will give Radiant the shot in
the arm that it needs. I'd appreciate your thoughts and feedback.
All the best,
Sean Cribbs
P.S. Incidentally, a solution to Josh French's problem with building
a project with the Radiant source in the root could be solved with
git-svn, allowing him to keep up to date with the source of Radiant
while building his own project in the same tree. Git is much more
powerful at managing multiple sources of changes.
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