On 3/18/15, 5:10 AM, "Krüger, Olaf" <okrue...@edscha.com> wrote:
>> This message is meant for everyone who thinks that if they wait long >>enough, a release will spontaneously materialize... >> If half of the folks on this list each found 30 minutes a month to work >>on FlexJS... that would result in 200 person-hours per month, which >>easily exceeds my total monthly output > >I'm sure that there're a lot of people including me who always had a >guilty conscience cause of only consuming new stuff without contributing >anything. >But I'm also sure that there're a lot of people who are willing to >contribute and if 30min per month would help to really move on any kind >of Flex project even more. >I think the thing is that the hurdle before entering new stuff is always >high... much more than 30 minutes ;-) Also I think a lot of us see >themselves as application developer using an given Framework instead of >developing it. This is another challenge. >Perhaps we could collect some ideas how to encourage the community to >contribute and ideas how to scale down the hurdles? > >To reach most of us my first idea is to send regular 'contribute >invitation' emails to the dev AND users group. This email could contain >all existing Flex projects with an extract of concrete upcoming tasks. >Perhaps this makes it easier to all of us to find a concrete starting >point to contribute? Sending emails is a reasonable suggestion. Really, those emails should be release announcements. For FlexJS I’ve been (and still am) buried in some big refactorings so we haven’t had a new FlexJS in too long. But soon I hope to get back to more frequent releases. Regarding the task list and getting started hurdles and the fact that many of you consider yourself more of application developers vs framework developers, I think one way to approach FlexJS is to think of a small test project on the order of FlexStore that you would use to convince yourself or your bosses that FlexJS is ready for harder tasks. Then get FlexJS installed and try to build that project. I’d bet that most of you have created a monkey-patch by now. In the past, it was hard to get your monkey-patch accepted by Adobe. In theory, Apache is all about accepting these monkey-patches. So if in the building of your test project you find a bug and create a monkey-patch to fix it, that patch is your contribution. File a bug in JIRA and add the patch. JIRA should be our effective task list. Put features you find missing in JIRA as well and maybe someone else will work on it. IMO, that’s also the Apache Way. Instead of having to convince Adobe product managers that your feature or fix is important enough to be included in the next release, you just submit it in JIRA and Apache Flex committers are supposed to help you get it in. And if you do that often enough, you’ll probably become one of those committers. And a reminder, it will be rough going for a while and you’ll find lots of things missing, but that may comprise your early contributions. You might be adding to wiki or README how to get started, or just filing JIRA issues. Thanks for your offer to contribute, -Alex
