From: thedimka

2010-03-21 02:05 am (UTC)

If people want to help an Open Source project with graphics or UI it is even harder to do, because most designers are not that familiar with source control and most of the time there are guidelines or any directions on how to contribute anything for improving UI or any usability part.

Probably it would be useful to have a paragraph with instructions for people like that. From: ext_228581

2010-03-21 07:22 am (UTC)

poor usability I have experienced open-source as a very closed community, it is dominated by a developer mindset (that is impenetrable to anyone who is not a developer) that is extremely limiting it's reach.

http://www.iamronen.com/2009/10/closed-open-source/

From: iamo

2010-03-21 02:16 am (UTC)





And if it is, I can pretty easily guess that it's going to be fairly easy to contribute. Of course, that doesn't mean projects shouldn't also link to the main github branch or somewhere like it. Github has gone a huge way towards reshaping this scenario as a rule. My first instinct now on wanting to know more about how something was implemented in an open source project or to contribute to it is to check if it's on github. I don't even bother looking for info in the README or related ALLCAPSes until after I've checked there.And if it is, I can pretty easily guess that it's going to be fairly easy to contribute. Of course, that doesn't mean projects shouldn't also link to the main github branch or somewhere like it. From: askbjoernhansen

2010-03-22 11:37 pm (UTC)

Yeah - I want to second that. git makes this process about a billion times easier. Even without github it's trivial to make and manage your patches (maintain your fork, really) until you figure out where to send them and get them accepted "upstream". From: bluesmoon

2010-03-21 03:55 am (UTC)

I started writing opensource code in 1999, and I wrote a lot of it. I was also a very heavy contributor to various lugs in my area and on irc. Then in 2004 I joined Yahoo! and the bulk of my contributions stopped. Over the following months I almost completely disappeared from the mailing lists I used to frequent.



The biggest reason for this though, was that my primary opensource projects competed with a Yahoo! product, so I couldn't ethically keep working on it. My participation dropped to commenting on coding style and giving people commit access. Secondly, Yahoo! has an awesome internal developer community from which I could get my daily "fix" of technical discussions, rants and flame wars. I no longer felt the need to drop in to an external mailing list and the only times I did were to say hello to all the people I'd met over the years.



Contributing was never a problem. If something didn't work, I'd search for the source website, download the latest tarball and submit a patch on the mailing list. If they didn't want it, I didn't care, I'd just put it up on my web page and let others download it from there. As long as it solved my own problem, I was happy. In one instance though, my patch wasn't just accepted, but I was instantly made "lead volunteer" of the module I'd just patched since no one else was doing it. From: ext_228575

2010-03-21 04:06 am (UTC)

I haven't found figuring out *how* to contribute to be terribly difficult, especially given that most of the projects I've been interested in are on GitHub. The complaint I have is that many times patch submissions (or "pull requests" in GitHub parlance) go into a black hole, with no response from the maintainers of the project. Frustrating. From: (Anonymous)

2010-03-21 06:05 am (UTC)

And so... When are you going to solve the other problem? The bigger one is of large companies swallowing open source contributors and them no longer giving back to the community that made them so employable.



I know it's asking a lot, and google is probably the least of the problematic communities, but it seems like you solved the wrong problem here ;-)



(Matt Sergeant - forgot my LJ id) From: coffeechica

2010-03-21 06:22 pm (UTC)

Re: And so... Precisely -- it's the mindset of large companies to be instantly against open source. Why, after all, would we want to share our trade secrets with the rest of the web? They do not see what's in it for them.



Well really, is there anything profitable in it for them other than rep from a small percentage of internet users? There's my open-ended question that I'm really interested in hearing practical (not idealistic) answers to. From: ingulf

2010-03-21 07:38 am (UTC)

"I'm sure most companies have more internal consistency in tools & processes than the collective open source community."



ROFL! From: (Anonymous)

2010-03-21 03:10 pm (UTC)

DOAP Great idea. I had the same thing in mind about a year ago.

You can find my ideas about a distributed development system

using already existing semantic web technologies here:

http://turbo24prg.github.com/distributed-development.html

---

TL;DR:



PLEASE use structured and linked data, so people can actually use it mechanically and build tools on top of it. Thanks!



There's the DOAP project, developing a RDF schema for describing software projects: http://trac.usefulinc.com/doap/ . You can find a good description at: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/doap.xml



There are already many projects using it, e.g. http://pypi.python.org/pypi and launchpad.net (even including maintainers).



From: ext_224280

2010-03-21 03:36 pm (UTC)

Like this?

http://www.openlierox.net/wiki/index.php/Development



Did that a while ago already. :)



Ack otherwise to the post. Whereby, personally, I don't remember any project where I had problems to find the most recent trunk code.

From: brad

2010-03-21 06:27 pm (UTC)

Curious: what OpenID URL did you start with such that LiveJournal or Google gave you such an ugly URL here? Do you have a public Google profile? From: mart

2010-03-22 03:33 pm (UTC)

I think that's what you get if you use the originally-documented identifier-select (or "directed identity") flow. Presumably Google OpenID is stuck with those URLs now because if you change them then folks won't be able to access their existing accounts... If you choose to "Sign in with Google" on TypePad we assume the identifier http://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id and get the same sort of result. From: quadhome

2010-03-22 12:05 am (UTC)

A page that lists all of the registered projects? From: pinterface

2010-03-22 05:21 am (UTC)

Submitting patches? In my experience, that's the easy part. "The ... code review tools, ... submit queues, continuous builds, test bots, documentation, and all associated machinery and processes", on the other hand are practically non-existent. Shoot, I'd be thrilled if most of the projects I end up patching had outdated documentation and half a test suite because that would be an improvement. (Common Lispers are particularly bad in this regard, which isn't really helping my lackluster documentation and testing habits. :/ ) Speaking of all that fancy stuff you guys have to make hackin' easy, is that documented anywhere for general public consumption? Because that, I think, would be an interesting read. From: ext_228646

2010-03-22 05:53 am (UTC)

isn't this what google and a project homepage is for? I'm curious about why you'd like for developers to place project essential information on contributing.appspot rather than the project homepage itself? Most developers interested in a project will just google the project, find the homepage and look for all of this information here. Searching for memcached, for example, lists the project page in the first 10 results, but nothing about contributing.appspot.com. Shouldn't the essential contribution information live closer to the other project documentation or code itself? From: brad

2010-03-22 06:04 am (UTC)

Re: isn't this what google and a project homepage is for? memcached has moved homes 4 times, and 3 different version control systems so far (cvs -> svn -> git)



I'm thinking long-term here.

From: brad

2010-03-22 06:07 am (UTC)

Re: isn't this what google and a project homepage is for? Also, when you say:



> Most developers interested in a project will just

> google the project, find the homepage and look for

> all of this information here.



That's exactly the problem. I don't want contributing to open source projects to be a research problem, hunting around. It should be easy to find, like OWNERS file in Google.