On 11/05/2013 janI wrote:
HOWEVER, fact is that we have a change in committers, in a downward spiral,
add this moment in time, our active base is not growing ! I see this as
normal in an opensource project who all have waves. I have however been
confirmed in how strong we are, by seeing how ideas to change it, have been
exchanged in this thread.
Numbers are very slippery here. If you count people, the majority of
OpenOffice contributors do not need to be able to code or even to use
SVN, and a project with an hypertrophic (too large in proportion with
the rest) developers group would be very unbalanced.
See how many new contributors are not reflected in your numbers. Look at
QA, for example; or documentation, or localization. These people far
outnumber the people who have not contributed via SVN recently: and
often people who were contributing via SVN are now still contributing,
but in other ways (for example, your very welcome work on the Wiki
"killed" some website contributors who now prefer to work on the Wiki
and are no longer shown).
New (or "converted") contributors are still helping development a lot,
but indirectly: look at the dependencies of
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121420
to see how introducing the Sidebar has been a collective effort by many
contributors, even though the code was only modified by a few people who
could benefit from the QA work and suggestions by dozens of other
contributors.
So, do we need to make life easier for new code contributors? Sure,
always; and anything that helps should be done, and this discussion
already identified some parts that we can improve, and GSoC will come too.
Do we need to worry if new contributors do not use SVN? Not that much,
as long as we can guarantee that, like in the above example, non-coders
know that they can influence the code development. If in this phase it
is more efficient for developers to just do stuff, after the 4.0 release
we will probably have more time to invest in mentoring new developers.
Regards,
Andrea.
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