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Postings from September 2014
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 3:13 AM, Aristotle Pagaltzis <pagaltzis@gmx.de> wrote: > * sawyer x <xsawyerx@gmail.com> [2014-09-03 00:45]: > > I think much of the bike-shedding is done because there is no clear > > direction. > > I think you have this backwards. It seems to me the reason there is no > roadmap is that there are way more people with opinions than people who > make things happen. (Yours truly included.) The peanut gallery on here > positively dwarfs the group of actual developers. > > The paucity of doers is partly due to the fact that various areas of the > code are less than accessible to novices. The people who actually go to > the effort of doing stuff mostly do so because they are compelled by > individual agenda (dito Leon). The darker corners especially demand the > persistence that is hard to come by in any other way than by force of > personal agenda (hence demerphq’s and KHW’s areas of expertise, e.g.). > I'm sure there are contributors who have no opinion or their priorities are wide enough to work on multiple fields. I'm also sure there are contributors who would be willing to work on fields they are less inclined to, simply because they want to see the project continue towards a certain goal. I know I've dealt with enough things I disliked because the overarching goal was something I wanted to see fulfill. I, for example, wouldn't mind taking a good look at the tests, for the sake of moving it onto a more solidified TAP printer. Is it possible that there is a vicious circle of "few developers -> no roadmap -> few developers" at work? So p5p is much less of a cohesive group than a loose collective, just > with various individuals in charge of various points of convergence, > e.g. the pumpking, to corral the output and maintain standards. > I fully accept that. I don't think it contradicts having a plan. To echo Nick’s themes a bit here, it does not seem to be for lack of > a list of places to go that we don’t have more people showing up who are > looking to contribute. And topics like “where do we see Perl in 5/10 > years from now” appear an especially open invitation to bikeshed with no > particular intent to implement. The modesty of a TODO list is an asset > in averting such diversions. > The fact that a question might be an open invitation to bikeshed doesn't mean it shouldn't be asked. It means we should learn how to answer and talk about it. It could be good to more consciously curate the one we have, though. > Say for example, interviewing people who commit code to ask what their > personal unpublished TODO lists contain, and compiling and editing the > result; see if there are things in there that could be delegated. > That sounds like a very good idea. Is this something others would find comfortable? In the absence of a developer group agreeing on formalizing this, it would useless, no?Thread Previous | Thread Next