change of maintainership in KDevelop

[Richard Dale]

On Sunday 02 April 2006 17:16, Alexander Dymo wrote:
> On Sunday 02 April 2006 17:34, Matt Rogers wrote:
> > Also, it was suggested that rather than maintainership being the burden
> > of just one person, it should be shared between a group of people with
> > one person being the "lead" maintainer.
>
> That's ok.
>
> > I also volunteered for the position of
> > lead maintainer as well.
>
> You have my vote :)
>
> > The group maintainership thing is in no way meant
> > to be exclusionary. It's purpose is actually to provide other developers
> > with a place to go so that they can get an answer from people who know
> > more about KDevelop than the average developer. Please let me know if
> > you'd like to volunteer.
>
> Ok. I'd like to join you as one of the maintainers group. Does anyone have
> objections?
>
> > I hope to have everyone's support and I'd be happy to answer any
> > questions or concerns.
>
> I had my questions already answered at irc and I completely agree with two
> answers I got
> Short summary:
> - http://www.kdevelop.org/mediawiki/index.php/Maintainers is too specific
> and should be revised
> - maintainters group should be no larger than 5 people
>
> PS: let's not assign maintainers for specific parts of kdevelop. I'd opt
> for some "maintainership freedom" ;)
While I think it's good that Matt has volunteered to replace Roberto, it looks 
like we'll have even less people working on KDevelop 4.0 than we did on 
KDevelop 3.0. From what I can remember about KDevelop 1.x development in 1999 
or so when I started doing patches for Objective-C support/submitting c++ 
parser fixes, there seemed to be more active developers then, than we have 
now. Meanwhile, the KDE project must have grown at least 2-3 times in terms 
of developer community size. Maybe as long as we have just enough people and 
they're good enough, then the absolute size of the developer community 
doesn't matter.

But I really think we should have some kind of recruitment drive once KDevelop 
4.x is mature enough to be able to add extra people. Can we get some ideas 
from projects like Amarok or whatever who are good at attracting developers? 
Lots of tasks, like creating new project templates are excellent first 
projects, and you don't need to be the new David Faure to do them. 

If KDE doesn't have a killer application development environment for C++, and 
for RAD development in languages like Python, Ruby, Java and C# that can be 
used for custom application development, then it's going nowhere as far as I 
can see.

-- Richard