On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 5:10 PM, timita <timita@anonymised.com> wrote:
Apologies if this sounds like criticism - far from my intention - but
saying
that it's irrelevant whether people use it or not sounds discouraging.
I don't mean to discourage contribution, mind, but I do want to discourage
the
notion that people can just ask and developers have nothing better to do
than
follow their requests.
If GeoServer was a paid product, it might make sense to do that, so that a
new
set of licences are getting sold at the N+1 release.
But it is not, and development is really driven by necessities of the
contributor's
paid work (plus some spare time activity that clearly cannot be steered any
way,
each one has a right to do what they prefer outside of working hours).
It's actually somewhat worse than this, in that the project is being kept
alive by
a bunch of people that perform a number of unpaid activities, like user
support,
code reviews, releases, participation to the monthly bug stomp and the like,
while others merrily keep on "contributing" bits of code that they were
sponsored
to work on, without taking on any of the above. Now that's fine for a
isolated contribution,
not so when they are repeated over time (like, there is clearly a business
revolving
around the project, but without the "cost" that core devs pay daily),
because it's
discouraging, upsetting and eventually starving the core devs (starving as
in,
the ratio between actual maintainers and available code to maintain worsens
and worsens
over time).
Anyways, I'm digressing 
The key point is that actual change needs actual resources.
The name "GeoServer - User" suggests a public forum, even though it's not a
public service. Ultimately, a public discussion could 1) spur activity
around a module, leading to contributions 2) help with gathering valuable
feedback, such as use cases,
Yep, we have multiple rounds of these two, if you check the archives.
3) allow users to team up and support a feature
which might be too expensive for a single user to fund.
This bit is actually partially covered too, there are more pull requests
showing on on JDBCConfig,
which is a sign of interest and partial resourcing. What is missing is an
actual maintainer
(someone that reviews pull requests, answers user questions, and generally
truly
participates to the project life), enough that the module can switch from
community "hell"
to official extension.
Cheers
Andrea
==
GeoServer Professional Services from the experts! Visit http://goo.gl/it488V
for more information.
Ing. Andrea Aime
@geowolf
Technical Lead
GeoSolutions S.A.S.
Via di Montramito 3/A
55054 Massarosa (LU)
phone: +39 0584 962313
fax: +39 0584 1660272
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