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

[Yves Moisan]

>  
> 
> 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.

I'm probably not the most "ISO" project manager out there so take the
following with a grain of salt.  I'm inclined to let people judge if
they should submit a rationale on the list for a change implementation
they want.  At this point in time where we have not really reached a
"1.0" release, I believe we should minimize the amount of "paper work"
and let people judge if their proposed changes will have enough of an
impact on GP as a whole to notify the list or ask for comments.  I
believe all current committers on the SVN are conscious that they are
not in a sandbox of their own in the current state of things.  We ought
to make sure new committers also understand that.

> 
> 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.

Thanx for your suggestions Daniel.  If we do indeed get people
interested in developing GP, then we need a bit more formal rules for
code committing.  Relying on the past experience of other projects
definitely is important.

> 
> 
> >  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 ?

Alexandre : do you think we need that now ?

> > 
> 
> 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.

Please send me a copy of that file off list.  I think that's a good idea
to have such a file now.  When we add folks new to GP in that file, then
we should have some sort of committer agreement ready.

Thanx for your input,

Yves