[Geoprisma-dev] Project management / Pointers for potential contributors (doc)

[Daniel Morissette]

Alexandre Dube wrote:
> 
>  I just commited some changes (r725) on a feature without asking anyone 
> about "why" or "what" things were the way they were.  I've been 
> wondering, since GeoPrisma is now an official OSGeo project, 


Please note that GeoPrisma is _NOT_ an official OSGeo project: it is 
only _hosted at_ OSGeo.

To become an official OSGeo project, GeoPrisma will have to go through 
the incubator, but we're not ready for that yet.


> if we're 
> supposed to follow a different way of managing the project, like 
> creating tickets, asking for reviews of patches, etc.
> 

Any open source project with more than one contributor and that aims to 
attract more contributors should have well known procedures for 
submitting code, patches, planning releases, etc. Whether these are 
formally documented in writing, or just well known unwritten common 
practice between the contributors depends on the size and maturity of 
the project.

My opinion is that the GeoPrisma team should agree on the processes 
(i.e. tickets requirements, code review or not before commit, coding 
style, release process, etc.) and should start documenting them as it 
goes, but there is no urgency to do it all at once. We should also avoid 
reinventing the wheel and should instead reuse as much as we can from 
other more mature projects such as OpenLayers or MapServer.


>  We could at least have a pointer in the documentation for the ones who 
> wants to contribute to the project.  I'd volunteer for the creation of 
> such a doc.  What do you think of the idea ?
> 

This reminds me that we should maintain a list of active and past 
committers with their name, email address, affiliation (company, 
independent, etc.), and area of responsibility in the code. In the case 
of MapServer, we do that in the COMMITTERS file that is included at the 
root of the source tree.

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/