[openbeos] Re: 3rd Party Opportunities
- From: Stephan Assmus <superstippi@xxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:34:07 +0200
Hi Simon,
I am writing this from my own perspective as a developer having tried to
get to know other people's projects with which I would possibly be
interested in helping them.
IMHO, the problem is rather how to get people involved. And I think many
talented developers, who dive into big projects and need more hands, fail
to realize how important it is to get certain aspects of their projects
right. For example, it is very important to get the build system right,
people need to find information easily about where is what and how to setup
their build environment. For example, Nirvana has mutliple branches for
each developer, and to me it looks completely confusing. I don't know where
is what, and how to piece it together - *appearently* (to me) each
developer worked on a different possible approach to the whole project. I
couldn't get anything to build at all, and I unsuccessfully (until now)
tried to get help with that. I don't mean to bash the project, I really
know that the developers probably have very little time. So please, I don't
mean to upset anyone, I'm just trying to get you to understand how
important this is.
Yesterday I downloaded the source to Themis, and everything built out of
the box. So my impression is much better and I *feel* like I could dive
right into it. It also has more documentation of what the developers where
doing. I know that it takes effort from myself to get involved with a
project, but the people already in the project should try to not put up any
extra hurdles that the people interested in the project feel like a
complete waste of time having to bother with. Another example is VLC, where
I really would have loved to fix some things in recent versions, but each
time I tried, I wasted at least a *day* trying to set up the build system
and then failed in the end.
I agree that there might be value in an umbrella organization, but on the
other hand, I feel like we already tried that (BeUnited) and it didn't
produce these apps in the end. I would like to tell some people looking for
help in their project to try and download their source on a clean system
and figure out what kind of problems interested outsiders will run into,
and then fix or document these problems. They are much more likely to get
help that way. We *do* have some people interested to help in our
community, but everybody needs to make an effort not to waste their own
time (by failing to make it's existance known properly) and the time of
other people.
Another suggestion would be to use the haiku-os.org blog system more, so
that we have a central place for publishing such news and developer tales.
I think it would be beneficial, because IMHO the places on the web where
something BeOS/Haiku related happens are too spread out. Maybe it's just my
ignorance, but I learned about the existance of Nirvana maybe two years
after the fact... and I do try to read the news sites regularily.
Best regards,
-Stephan
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