On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 07:51:00PM -0400, Marcus D. Leech wrote: > What it seems to come down to is a lack of initiative. We are all willing > to wait until someone else does something for us, and then report on the > problems. But it's hard to start something and push it out there. First, > you expose yourself to criticism and bug reports. You might feel > uncomfortable about your code. Don't. Don't worry about those things. We > the community as a whole will be much more grateful for your efforts in > making the project better than insulting you for mistakes or "ugly" code. > We can work on minor issues like that. Especially if everyone is helping. > > Thanks for your time, > > Tom > > Having been a contributor of both new-content and bug-fixes and "sidecars" > (like build-gnuradio), I can attest that the experience is very > rewarding. I only regret that I can't spend more time on making Gnu Radio > better. Between my full-time job, and spending my > "spare" (ha!) time *using* Gnu Radio for actual applications work, I find I > have less time for bug-fixing/contributing than I used to. > > The Josh object is amazing, to be sure. But even an energetic young > whipper-snapper like Josh can't keep from burnout forever. > So, those of you who feel competent to contribute, and have been holding > back, JUST DO IT :-)
I can agree on one thing in particular: I wish I had more time to work on GNU Radio, it's a great project. Also, contributing stuff is better than requesting things. Still, I also believe the community thing can be improved for GNU Radio. From my experiences, I can say that the process of contributing stuff is quite opaque. For the one-line bug-fixes, this seems not to be a problem. For bigger contributions, things could be smoother. First of all, how exactly does one contribute stuff? There's Tom's blog entry on how to use github, there's the gnuradio-patch mailing list, and theres the trac bugtracker. So what do I use? Do all major patches go through Tom? But isn't he busy? By the way, the official GR website seems to have a very outdated document on this topic (http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio/Development). And what kind of stuff is accepted, anyway? How do I know that whatever code I feel should be part of the GNU Radio core will be actually merged? The Coding Guide is a good step in the right direction. But let me suggest some other things to smoothen the 'community integration': - There could be another document with the definitive guide on how to contribute. Perhaps updating the previous link would be enough. Questions answered should include: * What kind of stuff is accepted into the core, what kind of stuff is better maintained as a separate CGRAN project? (Examples, refer to the mailing lists as a place to discuss this...) * The mechanics/protocol of actually submitting * What happens after submitting? - Revive the bug tracker. - Explain who's who in GNU Radio (seriously, who's actually actively developing GR besides Tom? Are there areas of responsibility? Who may submit to the master?) - Create a list of suggestions of contributions ("You want to contribute? How about you write a foo-agulator for standard bar? How about writing the docs for block `grep -R 'FIX MY DOCS' src/lib/`?") This would be great. MB -- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Communications Engineering Lab (CEL) Dipl.-Ing. Martin Braun Research Associate Kaiserstraße 12 Building 05.01 76131 Karlsruhe Phone: +49 721 608-43790 Fax: +49 721 608-46071 www.cel.kit.edu KIT -- University of the State of Baden-Württemberg and National Laboratory of the Helmholtz Association
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