On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Guy Waterval <waterval....@gmail.com>wrote:
> Hi Rob,
> Hi all,
>
> 2013/5/11 Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org>
>
> > I'm thinking we have three kinds of volunteers:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > 1) Twice a year (once a semester) we get an influx of college students
> > who have been told by their professor to contribute to an open source
> > project. That is a type #3 developer. What can we line up for them
> > to work on in the Fall, that they can get started with quickly? If
> > someone has only 10 hours to offer, and we'll never here from them
> > again, what can they do?
> >
>
> Why not to try to establish a durable collaboration directly with some
> schools or universities. So, you can deal with a limited number of persons,
> the teachers, who can after organize some projects as exercices for their
> students. The students could directly worked under the mentoring of their
> teachers. The first year could be more difficult for the professors, to
> learn and adapt to the system but after the things could be more easy to
> manage and it could be also motivating for students to make real work for a
> real project.
> But OK, for me the code is a blackbox, I don't know if such an organisation
> is possible or a lost of time for everybody.
>
> A+
> --
> gw
>
> >
> >
>
I think Guy's idea has merit, but...it would be difficult for us to predict
where our next developer might be.
I have been thinking about our "development" process a lot over the last
few months. We've done some "reasonable" things, like attemptint to mark
issues that are easy, etc.
One thing that might be a big obstacle for new developers is the build
environment itself -- a mixture of variety of languages, etc., and what we
use for the build process -- command line. We've already had a bit of
discussion about this.
New developers are probably used to some kind of GUI environment -- Visual
Studio, Eclipse, NetBeans, etc. I think our current build process is not
suitable to these kinds of tools. We need to put more effort into
retooling to make this a reality. I know some work is already started on
this.
Additionally, it takes a LONG time to build. I would think the length of
time it takes to do a complete build is also not something new developers
would be used to. We have many dependencies to build some portions
(modules). I understand these can not be eliminated, but we could certainly
use much more information on how to go about "partial builds" and integrate
them more easily.
So, no answers from me, just some things I've been thinking about lately.
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MzK
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference."
-- "The Serenity Prayer", adapted from Reinhold Niebuhr
