A Hangout was organised on the 20th of April, featuring some of the
committers/mentors. The following is a summary of topics discussed and some
insight to what will be happening in the coming months.
Members Present: Evan Hughes, Yuri Zelikov, Christian Grobmeier, Ali Lown
What are the roadblocks to new contributors?
New contributors do not have a full set of documentation to getting the
apache wave system setup and how they are to contribute (see ali's response
to todo's in previous mailing list). Contributors looking to update
documentation need to be given access to the confluence space, a discussion
about having a git repository was investigated and the task was handed to
Evan to investigate and propose the 2 methods to the mailing list in the
coming week.
How to help new contributors?
It was discussed to increase the amount of jira issues and tag them
correctly for beginners/starters and once a month provide these issues to
the mailing list so new users can see what needs to be done that is within
the starting skill level. Who would be handling this was not confirmed
whether it should be a person or an automated bot. This should be discussed
within the committers or discussed a week before start of month about which
issues to include and so on.
Level of coverage with tests:
The coverage of the project is currently low around 30 to 40% if i
remember from what ali & yuri were discussing. Writing new tests can be a
beginner task but should be written where appropriate to not clog the main
testing suite and maybe be placed in the extensive testing suite. A
coverage percentage should be chosen for the next release (not the 0.4
line) to help stabilise the project but is not high priority.
The server/client/common split:
This was shown to be a major issue as expected commits from a third
party were discussed and major large scale bugs need to be solved before
this is discussed more. After these issues have been resolved a gradual
long term plan can be set with a discussion with the committers.
The GWT discussion:
Some issues in jira were discussed that relate to gwt, it was discussed
whether gwt is what we want/need and it came down to its perfectly and
horrible. Mostly issue with gwt is lack of developers with knowledge if its
workings.
Issues which could arise:
It was discussed on how apache will react to a "team" of active
committers that is approx around 3 people as this is the minimum for
releases to be published. An active team of 7 to 8 is what we should be
aiming for as a short term goal for the project. More communication between
active committers should be established so the team becomes stronger.
General Comments:
- it was suggested that over the next month we gradually increase our
commits.
- individual committers have there own roadmaps, maybe we should allow
the committers to make this public on confluence or discuss more together
about where each aspect of wave is heading (design, high level backend, low
level backend, features)
- Was mentioned on whether this type of communication (hangouts) with
as many active committers/mentors should happen on a regular schedule.
