More Code Maintainers Needed
Posted: Wed Apr 04, 2012 8:11 pm
There has been talk about compiling a list of “open positions” regarding the open-source Uru development effort at OpenUru.org. I was planning to wait for that, but since it hasn’t materialized yet, I’m going ahead with something that has been on my mind for a while:
A position where OpenUru.org is sorely lacking is code maintainers: People who have push access to the repositories and can accept pull requests and patches. Not necessarily active code contributors themselves, and not necessarily experts enough to review and test all contributions by themselves, but able to organize reviews and act on reviews done by others.
Right now, OU has essentially one person in that position. That creates a single-point-of-failure situation. Rarified is doing a fine job at it, but he obviously has limited time for it besides real life and his other duties as shard admin, foundry admin, server developer etc. As a result, things progress very slowly. Pull requests are being left without activity for two months.* This is not a very inviting atmosphere for contributors. Adding more manpower could make a difference here.
Would my services in this capacity be welcome? I have limited spare time as well, so I alone can’t make much of a difference, but it would be a start.
Things don’t even need to go much faster, as the limiting factor is still Cyan at the end of the chain, who is slow (no judgement implied in that, just a statement of fact). But let’s not be even slower than Cyan. We shouldn’t be the bottleneck.
* In this particular case, other reasons come into play, as D'Lanor notes, but that is a different discussion that I plan to start shortly. Edit: here.
A position where OpenUru.org is sorely lacking is code maintainers: People who have push access to the repositories and can accept pull requests and patches. Not necessarily active code contributors themselves, and not necessarily experts enough to review and test all contributions by themselves, but able to organize reviews and act on reviews done by others.
Right now, OU has essentially one person in that position. That creates a single-point-of-failure situation. Rarified is doing a fine job at it, but he obviously has limited time for it besides real life and his other duties as shard admin, foundry admin, server developer etc. As a result, things progress very slowly. Pull requests are being left without activity for two months.* This is not a very inviting atmosphere for contributors. Adding more manpower could make a difference here.
Would my services in this capacity be welcome? I have limited spare time as well, so I alone can’t make much of a difference, but it would be a start.
Things don’t even need to go much faster, as the limiting factor is still Cyan at the end of the chain, who is slow (no judgement implied in that, just a statement of fact). But let’s not be even slower than Cyan. We shouldn’t be the bottleneck.
* In this particular case, other reasons come into play, as D'Lanor notes, but that is a different discussion that I plan to start shortly. Edit: here.