[LEDE-DEV] Actual community change and additional developers compared to OpenWrt

[Alberto Bursi]

On 10/24/2016 03:12 PM, Jo-Philipp Wich wrote:
> we need to
> find some more people compensate the missing developer time.
>

I'd say that you might want to make some kind of public announcement on 
the main site about this, stating what kinds of people you need and so on.
Maybe also contact Phoronix and other linux-oriented news sites to 
spread the announcement.

It is not obvious that you are also looking for people in key roles.

> I would be interested in a more contributor oriented insight at this
> point. For example it took me a while to realize that being on Github
> suddenly means that people edit C code via the web interface without any
> means to syntax / compile / run test their changes or to sign off their
> commits.
>

I'd say that current contribution quality requirements from people doing 
minor edits are OK, LEDE is a big project.

Would be cool to at least have an actual developer proof-read the 
current developer documentation and copy the correct parts in the LEDE 
wiki articles, even if raw and ugly. Formatting can be fixed by anyone 
(probably me) later.


> Which brings me to another yet unsolved point. There are large PRs
> (think the Mikrotik changes) which are unsuitable for inclusion as-is,
> yet too worthwhile to be left rotting.
>
> Maturing such change series takes time and needs to be happen in a
> dedicated staging tree, this is something we simply lack the man power
> to do atm. That would be another useful area to have some help in -
> having one or more persons who are able to incorporate requested
> feedback into otherwise orphaned PRs to shape them up for inclusion.
>

I'm not sure about what you mean here, why you say "unsuitable for 
inclusion"?
Would they be too disruptive to just merge as-is, at least until you 
find someone to do proper vetting on them?
Consider that you won't get people to mature them so soon anyway, and if 
you leave them there they will likely rot and that may be worse.

For the Mikrotik for example you could try asking the guy that submitted 
the patch to do this "maturing" after you merged it, for example as he 
seems to care about his patch, he rebased it for example.
Explain him the issue if you can.

This is a point where political and social needs (you want to look 
welcoming and want people to join you) clash with pure development needs 
(code quality issues).

These may be the standards you have to lower, at least until you get 
more people in and you have the people to ensure higher code quality.

Again take this as a suggestion, I don't know why you don't want to 
merge them and I can't probably comment on that anyway.

>> The same about that guy from a wifi community asking the state of
>> affairs. You can't let that go unanswered. Bad PR will add up and again
>> people will think you are the same as OpenWRT.
>
> I am not sure what you refer to here exactly.
>

The mail "[LEDE-DEV] Stability & release plans" by lede at yanosz.net

He might be a fake or not, but answering such questions is good usually.

-Alberto