------ Askarii ------
Great feedback,
yes I agree with just about everything that has been mentioned by other
contributors. This "un-easy" start is indeed a mistake on my part, but
it has the advantage of throwing to my attention most of the issues
involved with opensource Communities and their "nature", if I can put it
that way.
To answer a few of the questions which arose from this introduction:
1. I am from Canada
2. I speak, fluently, both french and english
3. I do not intend to develop (program) for GnuCash (this is to
answer Donald Allen), yet my intentions to help and contribute
remain. My "area" is administration and I plan on contributing by
administrating an aspect of the project. A recent idea was the
WishList.
4. I have read the dev. Wiki and it is perfectly intelligible ;)
Finally, to add to my knowledge of the project, is there a source of
information which states the known issues, current projects etc?
On 01/02/2011 11:37 AM, John Ralls wrote:
On Feb 1, 2011, at 8:00 AM, Christian Stimming wrote:
Zitat von Sebastien Daniel<sebastien.dan...@sebweb.ca>:
I recently joined the GnuCash -devel list, hoping I could contribute in some
manner.
The experience I can give is related to business management, accounting and my
academics, which are in the field of business administration and information
technologies.
As a note, I am by no means a developper, I only know html/CSS (for now).
Very good. Thanks for the introduction. (You might want to add a remark about
the country you're located in.)
I guess you have already read http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Development because
that wiki page should explain the different way of contribution. In case that
page is not entirely clear, feel free to change the wording there to improve it
even more.
This is also my first shot at contributing in an opensource project, so my
methods might not be the most appreciated, if so, simply point it out (nicely
pls :P ) and i'll adapt.
My first contribution would be to attempt a certain form of organisation, this being on a
voluntary basis, everyone should make their own decision on which "team" they
would want to be.
*The idea:
*Have two teams, each contributing in a different manner.
Team A would work on known issues, bugs and stability.
Team B would work on fonctionnality requests, general GnuCash improvement.
I believe this would help drive GnuCash efforts all in the same direction (in
sorts).
This is an idea, please give your feedback.
I'm sorry, but I have some very blunt feedback: This idea is out of touch with
reality and useless. Please keep watching this list for some time and you'll
soon realize that each active developer is always working on both different
goals that you've mentioned.
Instead of splitting the contributor base artificially as a form of team structure, you
should rather think of this community as a "centered set" with many different
possible levels of involvement. People are joining for increased involvement and are
leaving for lesser involvement all the time. If you have ideas that might help the
structure of this existing kind of group, please let us know.
To soften Christian's comment a bit, you need to know that there are only 5
developers with commit privilege who have committed more than a few code
changes in the last year, and a like number of people who regularly submit code
patches. There are also a couple (yes, two) committers who work on
documentation and another one or two who work on translations. The Gnucash
codebase is fairly large, and each of us tends to specialize a bit because it's
hard to keep the whole thing in one's head all at once. It's too small a group
to divide responsibilities along the lines you propose.
Another problem with your idea is that splitting coding responsibility into
bug-creators (implementors of new features) and bug-fixers is very inefficient
because the bug-fixers must devote substantial effort to learning what the
bug-creators have done recently.
Now to get more harsh: Even the worst consultants spend some time learning
about an organization before making recommendations. If you do have business
management experience, imagine a consultant telling you as part of his pitch
that your department needs to be reorganized. Think you'd bring him on? I sure
wouldn't. (Yes, I have hired consultants. My career was in manufacturing
management, not programming.)
Regards,
John Ralls
_______________________________________________
gnucash-devel mailing list
gnucash-devel@gnucash.org
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
