Le 22/02/2011 23:39, Thomas Martitz a écrit :
I didn't mean to say I would like to do work on someone else's plugin (as in new features). Just fix the most immediate problems. If the fix not a few-liner or no brainer I wouldn't bother with it any further anyway (but instead just disable the plugin for the time being).
I understand your purpose, but I doubt that such a policy would please anyone. Yes, I agree that IF the people that commit those fixes you talk about are only the ones that are competent to do so, it'd be acceptable IMHO. But with such policy it's likely that at some point somebody will feel too confident and "fix" somebody else's code wrongly. And there will be the drama, the hard feelings and the collapsing of the whole project -- I know, it's a pessimistic POV :D
Yes, very pessimistic. I'm a bit more optimistic and have trust that people can at least consider their competence before touching and committing to foreign code.
One might say it's only an optimistic POV ;)
And even then, code changes can always be undone.
That's true. Thanks to VCS :)
Perhaps I'm just biased by how slow things are currently going in the Geany core, where more collaboration (by more people) would help a lot (I even think it reached a dangerous level of standstill).
I can't disagree with this... but if maintainers have less time to work, I can't really blame them. As I said in a previous mail, IMHO the maintainers are quite responsible of how the project works; so I easily understand that they don't want to give commit access to somebody they don't trust. Though, perhaps they might think a little about it and see if there is some people that would be acceptable (I think of Lex in the first place, though I can't tell he's interested). But this is another discussion.
But I always think the more people the merrier.
That's generally true, assuming these people are smart enough to know their own capabilities.
Currently every plugin author does his own thing with their plugins and communicate very little about it.
I'd like it better if each plugin had a main maintainer and everyone else would be a co-maintainer. Now we have one and only one person working on each.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not against it. Why not. Actually, as far as everything goes right, I'm happy with your proposal. But I also fear what can happen if we don't explicitly ask the author.
A idea might simply be to ask every plugin author (and keep a list of their answer not to have to ask again and again) if they are OK with other people maintaining/developing/fixing/whatevering it. Perhaps even stricter, who they allow to work on their plugin. I guess this would be a good compromise, and would avoid hard feelings since its the author that chooses.
Regards, Colomban