On 13/05/11 15:05, Tomas Cohen Arazi wrote:
[1] We even stopped developing some features our librarians asked for until we could understand and fit into the dev community and the process itself. WE DON'T WANT TO FORK. Several times we had the feeling we could have spent our money/time in a more feature-providing way, but where confident that we could make our voice into the dev community. Day suspension fines is a feature we proposed to develop ourselves with some core-developer guidance but only got this answer: "liblime has developed that, wait for them to merge their branch". We are currently working with a small, harmless fork we can maintain updated.
I think there is a problem with the process that rfc's stake out areas out areas of development then people wait around until the original proposer delivers putting things on hold. If it doesn't get delivered, delivered when expected or as expected then everyone loses out. Really until you show some code its all wishful thinking. ( I have a number of projects that will solve the world's ills but I've not released any code yet ). We should not be fearful of forking, the license we use could be seen as encouraging it but insisting that having forked you preserve the rights to the code you have just taken advantage of. With regular scheduled releases its easier to keep the fork in touch with the main branch which also makes it easier to fold it back in to the main line of development, because even if your fork has features that others may not want, you want all the good stuff that is in the main branch. As a community we are very good at implementing the middle range features (and don't belittle them they are what most of are users cherish in the system ). We're a bit less good at the big chunks of functionality but I'm sure thats fixable, (and Chris's successful shifting to TT for 3.4 shows big things can be done). We're also a bit behind the curve on the plumber like code maintenance tasks ( we are going to have use warnings in all scripts oneday, right?) that have less visible user impact but aid future development and avoid introducing bugs. Colin -- Colin Campbell Chief Software Engineer, PTFS Europe Limited Content Management and Library Solutions +44 (0) 845 557 5634 (phone) +44 (0) 7759 633626 (mobile) colin.campbell@ptfs-europe.com skype: colin_campbell2 http://www.ptfs-europe.com