This Project has no future!

[Dominik Ruf]

Hi all,

I was in denial in the past years. But it is time to face the facts. This
project isn't going anywhere.
About a year ago I already expressed my worries, but next to nothing has
changed since. There are still pull requests that are multiple years old.

For example, my bootstrap PR is still not pulled completely. There is still
a discussion about whether (and how) we should use minification and source
maps.
These are technologies that practically every web application in the world
are using. So this should be a no-brainer. And yet, after more then 2 years
we discuss if adding the source map flag should be in a separat changeset.
Seriously guys, this could be in the dictionary as the very definition of
bikeshedding.

What troubles me the most about this, is the lag of communication. It
sometimes takes weeks or even month to get any kind of feedback.
I understand that people are busy, but as a leader of a project like this
you should at least drop a quick sorry note and say when you will be able
to look into the thing. Or delegate!

And I'm not the only one who has this problem. Our bitbucket is full of old
PRs that went nowhere. Take the ssh PR for example. That one is 3.5 years
old! I believe most of those people just gave up.

I really believed this project had potential. But all my attempts to
improve the communications or the projects organisation have been ignored.
And my PRs were treated purely and very slow.

What needs to change:
- Stop pondering if some small change should be its own changeset
This wastes A LOT of time. The quality of the code needs to have a higher
priority then the quality of the changeset history!
- Stop making the 'better', the enemy of the 'good'.
If somebody comes up with a better solution in the future, great, but up
until then settle with the good solution you have now.
- Start using JIRA to manage and prioritize the open issues, PRs and other
tasks.
This projects simply needs to get organized.
- Promote riot.io as communication tool for more direct engagement.
I mentioned before, that I think mailing lists and IRC are anachronistic
tools. And they are not ideal to engage with people.
In the mean time, Andrew set up the matrix.org bridge, which allows to use
apps like riot.io to chat with our IRC channel. riot.io allows to always
stay online and search in the conversation. But AFAIK practically nobody
knows about it.
Using the riot.io web and phone app can and will speed up the conversations
a lot.
- Engage with people.
It can not be that our PRs and open issues lay around for years. If there
is no activity, a person in charge needs to reach out to the
assignee/commiter/reporter. And if there is no hope that the issue/PR will
be solved it needs to be closed. In general, talk to the people. There can
be no silent treatment!
- Get serious about new features that make kallithea competitive.
SSH, custom (git) hooks (activatable per repository) and scaleability are
must haves. (kallithea currently does not work well with many user, many
repositories or big git repositories)

Since I see little to no chance that these things will actually change, I'm
afraid I'll have to cut my losses and give up as well.

cheers
Dominik
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/kallithea-general/attachments/20180409/4f19c489/attachment.html>