[Radiant] Moving forward more quickly

Tue Apr 1 15:15:46 CDT 2008

Hi Sean,

Great thoughts, and fantastic to hear that you will devote even more  
time to Radiant.

Evan just gave that same speech here at the Ruby Fools 2008 conference  
in Copenhagen, and you are right: It is quite inspirational. Git seems  
to be the right choice for opening up the contribution process. Now  
that Rails is also moving to git, it will gently push a lot of people  
in the community to install and learn to use git.

Cheers,
Casper Fabricius

On 31/03/2008, at 19:15, Sean Cribbs wrote:
> Radiant users and developers,
>
> Over the weekend I took the time to watch the presentation by Evan  
> Phoenix about Rubinius that was given at MountainWest RubyConf 2008,  
> available from confreaks.com (You should watch it, too!).  I was  
> mostly interested in hearing where Rubinius was technically, but his  
> talk took a very different path in that it focused on how community  
> is being fostered in the project.  His primary points were about  
> encouraging experimentation and lowering the bar of entry. Some of  
> his comments really struck home with me, which I'll paraphrase here:
>
> 1) A team of 'core committers' tends to stifle debate and  
> experimentation and marginalizes those who have differing opinions.   
> This also has the effect of slowing progress on the project when the  
> core team is unable to participate.  If someone is enthusiastic  
> about contributing, that should be fostered, not squelched by a high  
> barrier to entry.
> 2) If a project is open-source, it should be much more open than  
> most projects actually are.  Rubinius gives 'commit bits' after the  
> first accepted patch.  This promotes the feeling of a real community  
> project, rather than a closed, orchestrated one.
> 3) Small changes often encompass some of the greatest effort.  One  
> should allow small, incremental changes, no matter how tiny.
> 4) It's ok to make mistakes.  No one, even a 'core committer', is  
> infallible.  Learn from your mistakes, document them, and move on.
>
> The pace of Radiant over the last few months has been slower than  
> snails.  I want to remedy this.  I also want to
> make amends for the ways that I might have squelched dissent or  
> artificially slowed the progress of the project through over- 
> engineering the timeline and smashing potentially transformative  
> ideas.
> To this end, I want to attempt an experiment.  The first step is  
> that I would like to open up the codebase for more experimentation.   
> I have created a clone of the Radiant Subversion repository on  
> GitHub (http://github.com/seancribbs/radiant/tree/master).  I  
> encourage everyone who is interested in hacking the Radiant codebase  
> to fork it, make your changes, and send me pull requests.  During  
> this experiment, we will also be maintaining the traditional SVN  
> repo and I will push changes to it when necessary.  For those who  
> are familiar with 'git', this should be an opportunity to try out  
> that cool feature you've always been wanting to build. That said,  
> I'd like our basic ground-rule to apply, namely, that any patch you  
> submit should have adequate specs.  Although we like to pride  
> ourselves on our specs, the coverage in Radiant is still not  
> exhaustive, so any patches that improve the quality and quantity of  
> specs are also greatly encouraged.
>
> The second step is that I am going to start restructuring my time to  
> give Radiant the TLC that it needs.  I want to be a more nurturant  
> parent.  Earlier this year, John Long asked me to take  
> responsibility of the programming aspects of the project so that he  
> could focus on the design.  In recent weeks I have found that I am  
> not logging a full 40-hour week on my projects, and yet Radiant is  
> not moving forward.  Therefore, I will block out one day a week  
> (Friday) to spend tending to Radiant.  During this day each week, I  
> will be developing the codebase, addressing tickets and patches, and  
> possibly working on a podcast.  I also intend to have "office hours"  
> on the #radiantcms IRC channel on FreeNode all day (8AM US Central  
> to about 6PM).
>
> My hope is that both of these steps will give Radiant the shot in  
> the arm that it needs.  I'd appreciate your thoughts and feedback.
>
> All the best,
>
> Sean Cribbs
>
> P.S. Incidentally, a solution to Josh French's problem with building  
> a project with the Radiant source in the root could be solved with  
> git-svn, allowing him to keep up to date with the source of Radiant  
> while building his own project in the same tree. Git is much more  
> powerful at managing multiple sources of changes.
> _______________________________________________
> Radiant mailing list
> Post:   Radiant at radiantcms.org
> Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/
> Site:   http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant