

How to be an open source gardener (2014) - grey-area
http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an-open-source-gardener

======
hga
Money quote:

" _See, people think working on open source is glamorous, but it’s actually
not. Working on open source is reading 800 issues over the course of a
weekend._ "

Sign that the author does not suffer from the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit
Teenagers" software development model
([http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html)) ^_^;
after properly closing out feature and help requests issues:

" _3\. Was this issue for an older version of Rails than is currently
supported? If so, copy /paste an answer I wrote that asks if anyone knows if
this affects a supported version of Rails._"

Further signs follow, like following up!

Lots of good stuff here, like " _The only thing better than reproduction
instructions are when those instructions say git clone._ "

------
fit2rule
I have contributed to a number of open source projects over the years, and the
number one stumbling block that I have noticed, time and again, is simply
this: lack of leadership.

It seems to be quite an accepted practice to just push your code out there,
wrap it in some nice license, and forget about the project - this can be the
difference between whether the project goes forward or sits and stagnates -
and stagnate it will, even if you've got an avid following of users.
Contributors to the project may well come up with great patches and new
features and so on, but it will go nowhere if someone is not sitting at the
top of the hierarchy, accepting the patches, making a mainstream branch, and
releasing often new versions of the software.

I'm going through this right now with an open source project that is very,
very powerful (I won't name it, but you can guess if you look through my
comment history) and very, very useful to a lot of people. The project is
technically awesome - but the leadership, administratively, leaves a lot to be
desired and for those of us struggling to contribute to the project, its
extremely frustrating not to have someone holding the gavel and pushing things
out there on a regular release schedule.

So its not enough to be a gardener. You also have to have a farmer, a leader
type, who will make sure your produce gets to market in a timely manner. If
you're going to garden, make sure there's a foreman/farmer type who will take
the best of your work and put it on the truck to get to market. If there isn't
such a position, overt and available, then the very first thing you should do
on the open source project, if you want it to persist and do well, is insist
that there be such a role holding the reigns. It really is very important to
have leadership in the open source realm.

~~~
tcopeland
Yup. And part of leadership is handing over the reins cleanly once you're no
longer engaged in a project. By "cleanly" I mean removing your own admin
access, no longer merging patches once you're not really checking them
thoroughly anymore, not commenting on tickets based on half-hearted scanning,
etc.

I mishandled that one time with a pretty popular open source gizmo
([https://sf.net/projects/pmd](https://sf.net/projects/pmd)) and caused some
unnecessary static. Live and learn.

------
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593242](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593242)

~~~
grey-area
I thought this might have been posted a while ago, but also thought it was
interesting enough to post again after a year. Are there any rules on dupes?

~~~
dang
Why yes there are!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

~~~
grey-area
_in the last year or so_

OK, it's a fair cop ;) Will try to check manually for dupes in future.

~~~
tokenizerrr
It actually won't let you resubmit if there has been a recent dupe, as far as
I know.

