Hi Jo !

I launched a poll on the french community blog (darktable.fr) to see if
a founding of some sort would get support from users. The poll has been
up for 10 hours, we have for now 42 answers and the good news are :

  * 95 % of users are ready to put money in the project,
  * 2/3 would go for a feature-based bounty founding, 1/3 would go for a
    recurring crowdfunding (like Patreon/Liberapay),
  * the average contribution per bounty per founder would be 16 ± 15 €
    (average ± 1 std) summing up to 660 €/bounty in total
  * the yearly total participation per founder would be 62 ± 49 €
    summing up to 2545 €/year in total (for now)

So my question is : if we were to secure a recurring monthly revenue to
pay for seniors/core devs time, would they be able to clear some hours
each month to review code contributions or mentor new devs ? Platforms
like Liberapay allow easily (as far as I know) to split teams earnings
between the team members.

Also, if you trusted me enough to give me admin rights on redmine, I
would be happy to merge duplicates or close the solved issues to make
some room.

Have a good day !

Aurélien.


Le 10/09/2018 à 08:55, johannes hanika a écrit :
> hi,
>
> thanks for putting this list together! yes we're terrible dealing with
> these things. time seems to be the limiting factor here. the problem
> with recruiting new people to go in and fix these things is that you
> need someone to review the changes. which pretty much amounts to the
> bottle neck for our github pull requests or google summer of code and
> the like. now funding a full time employee for a secured amount of
> time is a completely different story than fixing a bug here and there.
>
> i agree that the procedure needs to be changed though. somehow the
> core issue seems to be senior dev time to me.
>
> cheers,
>  jo
>
> On Sat, Sep 8, 2018 at 7:24 AM Aurélien Pierre
> <rese...@aurelienpierre.com> wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> looking at the Redmine feature requests, it seems that a lot of legitimate 
>> requests are left idle, and some have been so for several years, generating 
>> duplicates. Most of these features are cosmetic User Interface improvements 
>> or making variables writable, such as :
>>
>> delete some EXIF+GPS meta-data in exported files (for privacy)
>> set the export file resolution from paper size and printing DPI, set the DPI 
>> value right in EXIF,
>> add/edit unique names/titles for modules instances, also within styles,
>> decompose the darkroom history by module AND module controls (decrease the 
>> history granularity),
>> add more JPEG exportation options (progressive, optimized, subsampling),
>> apply conditional styles automatically (the same way as the presets of the 
>> modules),
>> make styles hierarchical (to clean-up the list),
>> allow drawn mask edition (size, feathering, opacity) from the masks list and 
>> keyboard input values,
>> lock position and size of drawn masks for safe panning/zooming,
>> EXIF and IPTC management/edition requests (date, time, names of lenses 
>> without processor, scans with no/wrong metadata),
>> create arbitrary collections/catalogs of images (ex : family, perso, 
>> assignments),
>> implement ESC and RETURN shortcuts in every dialog to cancel and validate,
>> implement a coarse/fine tuning option to increment/decrement values with the 
>> mouse wheel
>> lots of small GTK glitches with scroll bars, lighttable selections and 
>> hovers,
>> link exported pictures paths to original RAW files,
>> allow to set the UI main color and create user-friendly theme/template 
>> (whitout editing CSS),
>> etc.
>>
>> Some are more algorithmically challenging :
>>
>> make the RGB gains independant in wavelets/non-locals means denoising module,
>> rotate/flip the sampling patch in the spot removal module and in the freshly 
>> merged retouch module,
>> add a color correction on A and B channels to fix the desaturation happening 
>> in the local contrast module (laplacian) with heavy settings,
>> display the locked AF point on previews
>> detecting duplicates and similar pictures in database
>> etc.
>> plus all the Windows portability issues.
>>
>> And there are still #TODOs in the source code.
>>
>> Most of these changes are for sure not the most challenging and don't make 
>> for the sexiest coding party, so I have no trouble imagining how little 
>> appealing they can be to hobbyist developers, but they are nonetheless 
>> useful and game changing for professionnals who are bound to efficiency 
>> constraints.
>>
>> I find quite remarkable the dramatic improvements that software such as 
>> Blender have known in the past decade, and though I get why dt developers 
>> aren't thrilled by the admin overhead involved in a similar fundation to pay 
>> full-time developpers, I think the above requests will stay idle for some 
>> more time if we don't go next-level. That would be a shame considering the 
>> core is stable and sane, and what is needed is mainly cosmetic.
>>
>> As more and more professional photographers adopt dt in their job and are 
>> asking for more efficency-driven features, I know that some would be happy 
>> to fund developpers to smooth all the sharp edges listed above. For now, the 
>> features that the developpers don't need don't stand a chance to appear in 
>> the software.
>>
>> So I found a platform where you could create a bounty for each feature 
>> request/bug on Redmine, have users/donators fund the requests they want in a 
>> crowdfunding way, hire freelancers to do it, and take care of the payment : 
>> https://www.bountysource.com/. You can create a dt group, link it to Github, 
>> open/accept/close/pay the bounties, etc. Actually, it seems that darktable 
>> has already a project page, but only linked to the Github tracker : 
>> https://www.bountysource.com/teams/darktable/issues.
>>
>> Shouldn't we merge Github issues and Redmine bugs/FR, and promote 
>> bountysource ?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Aurélien.
>>
>>
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