Re: [udig-devel] udig and community

[Jody Garnett <jody.garnett@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Andrea - I have had this email open all week trying to sort out how to reply to it. While I have added some comments inline - let me first state that I really enjoy working with everyone and will do everything I can to help.

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 7:44 PM, andrea antonello <andrea.antonello@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This something I can't find in the udig community and lately I am
wondering if I am the only one seeing it like that.

I understand the perspective; it is very difficult to encourage the development of a stable product when it is funded by a bunch of small contracts. It leaves a lot of the product stories to be accounted for by us the community; drawing on the resources and improvements made (as people add new functionality like WMS-C support or caching WFS support).

I was very happy with the sense of community shown during the code sprint; part of why that was successful was that those of us working in a consulting organization could warn our bosses that we were going to do some open source work for a specific amount of time. 

I would like to start a discussion here to understand who would be interested to plan a set of meetings in which this is a handled. Call it code sprint, call it whatever you want.

I would be interested; and if done as a set of meetings it will be much easier to organize participation all around. 

I am willing to partecipate and be present, but as I already mentioned several times we need the partecipation of developers that designed that code, since without them it will take hell of a time for the others to proceed.

Got it; understood and I will be there. 

I am interested in a well working udig first of all. A udig in which a fix made doesn't break other 5 things and is released without testing. A udig, in which we try redistribute the JIRA tasks bejond people interested and in which a Jody can blame (== remind) me for not having
fixed the bug in the time I said I would.

The handling of Jira is a good topic for a seperate email; we should probably have a bug cull (evaulate patches; accept or deny feature requests and so on). I would like to try and use Jira more formally to set a road map.

 

-meet to do a cleanup of JIRA, redistribution of bugs on active/willing developers

-better define a roadmap. The plugin system is great but also a suicide bomb in an anarchy.
-meet to do some bugfixing together (so newer developers can be assisted be senior udig developers)
-ony after that do some new features code sprint. I know fun is the most welcome, but first things first

Okay that sounds clear and responsible; and productive. 

With this I am not criticizing anyone or anything, I hope that is clear. It is a comment about how I see a sane community. Udig has infinite potential but is in a transition phase. Why in
almost every presentation I do about JGrass they ask me why I didn't migrate into QGis or Gvsig or even Jump?!? I have no problem to answer that question, since I am still 100% sure I did the right thing, but it hurts to hear that Udigis still not in the mouth of everyone. :)

Speaking of which I would like to see either 1) udig/jgrass workshop at 3 hours or a udig tutorial and a jgrass tutorial at foss4g 2009. The deadline is on monday! 

Please give me some feedback, of any type.

Thanks for your leadership Andrea; you are an excellent contribution to the community and you should know you are appreciated.

Jody