[Radiant] Moving forward more quickly

[Joe Martinez]

+1 For GitHub and +1 for this initiative.

I hope I can add value.

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 1:15 PM, Sean Cribbs <seancribbs at gmail.com> 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.
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