Help wanted: more qualified developers

[Sc...@lotus.com]

A  good discussion to have is: how do we get better developer participation
on the existing apache projects?  Is there anything the PMC or the projects
can do procedurally to encourage more people to write code?

In XalanJ2 the tried to partition the code better, and make it more
understandable.  I'm not sure we succeeded 100%, but we do have much better
developer participation outside of the core Lotus team (who are being paid
to do this work).  I'm actually pretty happy with the contribution level
(Gary Peskin is amazing and easily matches any of the contributions made by
the core team), though we could always use more.

XercesC has fairly little code contributions.

I'm not sure of the current level of code contribution to XercesJ2.  Could
someone on that team speak to this?

Not sure about XercesC.

Cocoon is clearly fine on this front.

Not sure about FOP.

Axis seems to be doing fine, from what I can tell.

Not sure about Batik.

-scott




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Re: Help wanted: more qualified developers

["Randall J. Parr" <RP...@TemporalArts.COM>]

Scott_Boag@lotus.com wrote:

> A  good discussion to have is: how do we get better developer participation
> on the existing apache projects?  Is there anything the PMC or the projects
> can do procedurally to encourage more people to write code?
>

I believe the establishment of a common base as has been repeatedly discussed
(ala AXDK, etc.) would help make it easier for new contributors to get involved.
It would reduce the learning curve and give new contributors a leg-up on all the
projects using the common base. I also believe it would free considerable time
for the current contributors (as evidenced by hearing almost the same
discussions in many different Apache lists about how to reinvent the wheel ala
properties, configuration, logging, parsers, etc, etc.)

I feel the comments on documentation are extremely relavent. Full-time
contributors who have climbed the learning curve do not have as much need for
documentation. It is, however, absolutely essential for new and/or part-time
contributors or users to get involved in any kind of cost-effective way. I want
to help and contribute but it seems to take a very large commitment of time to
get involved (ie enter the priesthood) as contributor.

I believe documentation METHODS and STRUCTURE should be established and further
considered as part of the common base (again as evidenced by a lot of wheel
reinvention). It would be substantially easier to contribute "a paragraph about
this" or "an explanation of how to use/configure that" if there was some place
to hang the contribution. If the full-time folks and/or architechs of all this
fun could provide a large but empty outline of the development and/or user
documentation required/desired, documentation contributors could hang the
ornaments.

My $.02

Thanks for all the work; I'm enjoying eating all the fish.

Randall J. Parr
Temporal Arts






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Re: Help wanted: more qualified developers

[James Melton <ja...@cylogix.com>]

I don't think I have solutions, but I sure recognize some problems. 

1. It takes a LOT of time to get involved in code development on one of
these projects. There is a ton of code of which I know 0% to start.
There seems to be no real architectural documentation that will help me
begin to get a grip. There are large documents from W3C that are not
light reading. There are an enormous number of emails on xalan-dev that
I can only scan without absorbing much (It's good as far as presenting a
lot of material, but bad in that I think I don't really know quite
what's going on). All this requires lots and lots of time.

2. Sorting out how to begin even on simple bug fixes is a problem. When
I read about bugs submitted by the community they often are not bugs,
but it takes an "expert" to make that call. I can find bugs in Bugzilla
but it would help if there was a status of "certified" applied by one of
the committers who should know if something really is a bug. Bugs are
the basic problems that people new to a code base can use to begin to
learn how things fit together. I will spend three weeks in my spare time
fixing something that you can fix in an hour or two of your work-day.
Given the heavy commitment (three weeks! of spare time that I honestly
don't have but steal from my family and employer) I really need to know
that I am working on the "right thing". 

3. When you look from the outside you realize quickly that this is a
full-time paid job for some people. It is difficult to rationalize why I
am doing work for which you are getting paid. I understand why I want to
work on this code but I am damned if I can explain it to anyone else.
They just look confused like maybe they need to find professional help
for me :)

To get more people you have to make it easier for people to be involved.
Consider documenting application architecture, documenting the
relationships between code and standards, categorizing bugs for new
developers, and issuing certificates of sanity that we can show to our
wives and co-workers when they ask, "What are you doing?"

Jim.


Scott_Boag@lotus.com wrote:
> 
> A  good discussion to have is: how do we get better developer participation
> on the existing apache projects?  Is there anything the PMC or the projects
> can do procedurally to encourage more people to write code?
> 

____________________________________________________________
James Melton                 CyLogix
609.750.5190                 609.750.5100
james.melton@cylogix.com     www.cylogix.com

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