On 26 April 2010 16:33, Pekka Enberg <penb...@cs.helsinki.fi> wrote: > > I guess the conventional wisdom says that the way to attract new > developers is to first attract users and testers and then turn them > into contributors.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. We have probably hundreds of thousands of users, people that can certainly program in the language that GCC is written. We do not have many contributors. I don't have numbers but I have the intuition that the ratio between users that are developers and contributors to the project is much higher in GCC than for the Linux kernel. > I can understand what you're trying to achieve with your bug tracking > system but I'm questioning if it's working for you. I am looking at That depends what you mean by working. It works for me because bugzilla does not get in my way when fixing bugs and most of the time is very useful. It also works for people that spend time reporting good bugs. Perhaps it doesn't work for people that don't have the time to follow up on bugs. But then, we have already a lot of open reports and features to work on, so perhaps missing those reports is actually saving us time. On the other hand, if people are willing to spent time reporting good bugs and perhaps providing a patch, and they don't have the tools or the infrastructure to help them, *that* is really bad. That is the people that we want to help. > this from Linux kernel development point of view and the lessons > learned there is that the lower you can make the barrier for entry > (bug reports, patches, etc.), the more likely you're going to keep old > people around and attract new ones. Thanks for your comments, even if we disagree. I am spending a lot of time thinking about these issues lately and I certainly appreciate your input. Cheers, Manuel.
