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[News.eclipse.foundation] Re: E4 / SWT 4.0
Francis Upton (News) wrote: 
Hi Eric,

I'm just jumping in here, not really knowing the context of this, but I want to make a couple of comments to what you say:

1) The main problem is there are not enough people working on the code to get things done. Much of the work is done by the committers, but also quite a bit is contributed. But the sum total of that is far less than what we need to clean out the bug backlog and satisfy all of the requests of the community.

*We need more people doing the work*; it really does not matter if they are committers or if they are contributors.

I definitely recognize that (and I think many other people do, though certainly not everyone who enters his own wish list feature requests). However, while we hear from one side of the collective project mouth that more contributors are needed, we hear from the other side of its mouth how they are spending all this time and effort on e4 planning. Well, if you have a backlog of bugs and enhancements to an existing code base, the prudence of moving resources in such critical shortage to a completely new effort is, well, debatable IMHO. Look at Micro$oft's history (and the reason many of the MS-haters are haters) for an example.
In short, it is not clear that a complete, ground-up redesign and the accompanying re-implementing and all the completely new directions, and <insert-your-favorite-e4-theme> is the best decision. So we need to do a better job of educating the community about what is happening and the directions that are being considered and how to become really involved.


I think however we need to get a *lot* better at encouraging contributions and contributors. We need more wiki pages and help and communication to help people contribute. We need infrastructure for this so that all projects can have a lot of materials and support to make it easy to document how to contribute, find contributors, recognize contributions and contributors, and do a better job of identifying work where we need help. Right now it's very uneven between projects because there is little in the way of common support for encouraging contributions.

See, I think dedicating the short supply of resources to making those things happen soon is more prudent than all the work being put into e4 already. How do I voice that concern/desire to someone who can actually respond with authority? That's a somewhat rhetorical question, but not 100%. And the "why don't you do those things yourself as your contribution" response is a non-starter here; I'm trying to steer the discussion away from that canned response and more towards "how can the existing contributor community better serve the non-contributor community?"


2) I also think, like any other open source (or many internal companies), it's largely a matter of relationships. You can get what you want by contributing code certainly; and you can also get what you want by working with committers and other contributors and having them make things a priority. If you are interested in a particular area, then get to know the developers and that's how you will influence things. I'm not saying this is right, it's just how things seem to work (at least in some areas).

I don't have a problem with that reality - in fact the embracing of relationships as a fundamental driving force is one of the aspects of OSS that I, personally, enjoy and consider essential to OSS success in general.
However, again using myself as an example, there are just often fundamental differences of attitude/philosophy/perspective that make it frustrating to break into the clique' of a project. My (least) favorite example is the SWT/JFace philosophy of minimalism coupled with backwards-compatibility-at-ALL-cost; it leads to these frameworks carrying a lot of baggage that makes them simultaneously difficult to extend and prone to excessive copy+paste coding. I do understand the driving forces that led to that prevailing philosophy, but I see too much dogmatism in some areas and too little flexibility in others. This is an example of a situation where I can try to contribute various artifacts (from code to design idea to behavioral change suggestions) but be thwarted at nearly every attempt because of the philosophical differences (or merely differences in the degree of philosophical dogma).


The problem here is this is entirely a volunteer effort, and yes there are full time committers, but their company is effectively volunteering their time. Personally, I don't want to see any more elaborate mechanisms for prioritizing things or having product mangement, etc because that will just add more process overhead.

Agreed, 100%. I think the things that would make the biggest difference towards engaging the community better and more are things like attitude and open-mindedness, not things like more committees or policies or procedures.

Eric