Re: getting more participation for development

On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 15:16 +0900, olivier Thereaux wrote:
[...]

A few things that I don't remember being mentioned here yet, not really
improvement ideas but rather some thoughts on why we aren't getting the
expected level of contribution:

The current validator and link checker codebases are plain scary for
newcomers, and sometimes also for the more regular contributors (at
least myself).

Perl itself is certainly a turn off for some potential contributors,
even if the current team working on this stuff is comfortable with it.
I don't personally have a problem with that.

But the one-huge-script-does-everything approach is a worse problem.
Thankfully we'll be getting rid of it in the foreseeable future;
assuming we do it Right, the learning curve is improved, and people can
contribute to specific parts of the app instead of having to master it
all at once.

Regarding the CSS validator, I don't remember the exact details (and
some of the following might be plain wrong and outdated, apologies in
advance).  But I have a gut feeling about being turned off because IIRC
the initial CVS checkout resulted in a tree with lots of duplicated
functionality in several different branches in the checked out tree,
non-working build environment, need to use Jigsaw instead of a
"standard" Jav appserver I would have been familiar with, and general
lack of documentation.  A quick peek into the root of the CSS
validator's cvsweb tree tells me that things have improved much since I
last looked into it, so it could be time to take another look soon.

Received on Tuesday, 28 June 2005 18:36:06 UTC