tomdroid-dev team mailing list archive

[Sandy Armstrong <sanfordarmstrong@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 9:01 AM, Benoit Garret
<benoit.garret_launchpad@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 3:13 PM, Sandy Armstrong
> <sanfordarmstrong@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 1:43 AM, Rodja Trappe <mail@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>> As a driver, I would want to drastically change some things:
>>>
>>>      * switching from Launchpad to GitHub
>>
>> Is this really necessary?  Switching code/bug/wiki hosting is a giant
>> pain for maintainers, developers, and users.  What if the next person
>> says "hey I prefer hg and bitbucket, let's move there"?
>
> Hey, I prefer hg and bitbucket, let's move there!
>
> Kidding aside, I strongly agree with Sandy's points. Moreover, as much
> as I love git (I use it daily at work and it's awesome once you get
> used to its quirks), its learning curve is steep as hell and I swore
> at it more than I would have liked to as a beginner. Tomdroid is an
> awesome app to get your teeth cut on, let's not deter beginners from
> contributing with a bad choice of tools.

I think this is becoming less and less relevant, with many thanks to
github.  I had as much trouble learning bzr as I had learning git, and
still am uncomfortable with bzr.  You could easily argue for Launchpad
because lots of Tomboy users are used to it from Ubuntu, or for github
because GNOME/Tomboy developers already know git.

So I wouldn't say any of these tools are "bad".  No matter what, a
brand new contributor needs to learn source control and bug reporting,
and those concepts can be hard at first no matter what tools you use.
As you say below, it's really more about how easy we make it for new
developers to hit the ground running.

> Something that's been on my mind for some time is the fact that we're
> not really welcoming to beginners. Maybe I'm using a straw-man here,
> but the problem I see is that they have to figure out everything by
> themselves. When you don't know anything about either bazaar,
> launchpad, android, java or even the way open source works, this can
> be quite an ordeal.
>
> In order to ease this pain, we could put up a "Tomdroid bootstrapping"
> guide, ie how to get the android sdk and eclipse installed, how to
> clone and publish changes with bazaar, etc. This information is
> already available somewhere on the net, but it would be much easier if
> this info was centralized on a page in the wiki, even if it's just a
> collection of links.

I think this is a great idea.  The best projects always have an
easy-to-follow getting started guide like this.

>>>      * publishing Tomdroid on the Android Market (each release, and a
>>>        separate dev-preview build for testing)
>>>      * much more frequent releases (with very small change logs)
>>>      * automatic code formatting
>
> These are very good points, my personal favorite is the last one. The
> code base is looking like Frankenstein atm, with tabs, spaces and
> inconsistent formatting everywhere.
>
> On the original question: I also don't have much time currently (no
> wonder the project hasn't advanced as much as we all would have liked
> to) and I would be dishonest if I pretended to be able to handle the
> maintainer's work. I can try a little harder to step up and handle
> part of the boring work but certainly not all of it.
>
> This being said, do we really have to have only one person doing most
> of the work? Can't we give the keys of the project to a team of two or
> three people? I'm speaking from inexperience here and there are many
> reasons this wouldn't work, I guess input from someone more
> experienced in open source than us would be very welcome (wink wink
> Sandy ;-) ).

Yup, as I said in an earlier email, multiple maintainers makes
everything a LOT easier.

Sandy