Necessitas is NOT a community project

[Koying]

 WARNING! This post is a rant, expresses only my own opinion and feelings 
might be harmed during the course of this reading.

*<RANT>*

This post is a reaction to a thread on the dev list where Bogdan was 
lamenting on the lack of commitment to the project.
I found it both laughable and pathetic in the sense that NOTHING is done to 
make it a project you can be committed to, and I'll expose, IMHO, why.

1) *This is a one man (and a half, sorry Ray), "benevolent despot" kind of 
project.*

Bogdan IS the project. Every single decision is made by him without 
discussions nor appeal. He has his vision for the project (that I didn't 
find, but it could be hidden in one of the zillions places the project is 
scattered into. More on this later) and I don't feel like he is open to 
discuss/challenge this vision.
This is human. AFAIK Bogdan created the project and feels he has all rights 
on it (which he has), but that prevents real involvement from others.
Fact is, if Bogdan is unavailable, the project just plain stops.

2) *NOTHING is done to make it a community project.*

I already ranted about this, but the scattering of the project resources is 
just plain ridiculous, laughable and a HOWTO not to make a coherent project.
Wiki on sourceforge, 1 mailing list on kde and 1 on google groups, 1 bug 
tracker on sourceforge and 1 on google code, unclear/hidden master 
repository, unclear contribution process, which leads me to:

3) *What the f... does necessitas has to do with KDE?*

I only assume Bogdan and Ray are KDE devs and that it is easy for them to 
host necessitas's master git and "contribution process" on KDE, but this is 
VERY wrong from a necessitas perspective. KDE might have its own 
contribution process but it is irrelevant to us and ridiculous for a 
necessitas contributor to have to register a kde account to be able to use 
reviewboard, itself, IMHO, a very obscure and complicated system for code 
contribution vs. what is existing in github or gitorious.
Obviously, all merge requests in the gitorious clone are ignored.
Pretty please, make gitorious the main repository, use gitorious merge 
request system and do whatever KDE stuff you fancy do in your own KDE 
corner.

4) *Accept contribution, reject them, discuss them or ask for update, DON'T 
rewrite them*.

Crying for contribution, then taking some parts of a patch to rewrite it 
you way, mostly incompatible with the original patch, is NOT the way to go 
to motivate contributors.

5) *The project is sloooooowwwwww*.

Due to 1), 2) and Bogdan's limited availability, necessitas is slow to 
progress in its own right. I kind of made my own necessitas fork to move 
on, and due to 4) it has diverged so much from the main trunk that I'm not 
sure I'll bother rebasing.

6) *Maybe related to 3), I don't know if it is necessitas or KDE, but one 
should definitely learn about the "git rebase" command*.

All the merges coming from I don't know which branches makes the git 
repository unreadable. The proper way to merge upstream is to rebase and 
resolve conflicts. Merging upstream is pure lazyness.

*Bottom line*:

*Necessitas is NOT a community project*.

Unless the issues outlined are addressed, It is pointless to whine about 
necessitas' lack of contribution. 
I suspect many of the more knowledgeable potential contributors will just 
take the trunk and adapt it to their needs, without bothering trying to 
contribute it back. Unless the project becomes more community friendly, I'm 
open to contribute to a potential fork.

*</RANT>*

Best Regards
- Chris -
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/necessitas-devel/attachments/20120315/8d743f2f/attachment.html>