Okay, no

[branchandroot]

So, anyone at all can submit pull requests to the OTW github, now. Supposedly, this way "experienced coders" can help in a drive-by way without having to jump through all the volunteering, form-filling, hoops.

That's nice.

Except for the part where you still need to jump through the hoops to get a development environment, the thing that lets you see the code from the back end. Without a development environment, the only way you can write a drive-by bug fix is by installing a local version of the Archive on your own computer or webspace which effort, the github documentation specifically says, will not receive any help or support. ETA: That's a bit better. A Windows install will not be supported, but there are some docs available for OSX or Linux; the Secretary has also added a link to the new IRC channel, which is entirely laudable.

And why the hell should anyone go to that kind of trouble? In what way is that "casual"? In what way is this actually useful? ETA: In particular, how is this useful given the OTW's history of bad faith and abusing their pool of volunteers, to date? How is a "well, it's better than most" barrier going to convince anyone who's been watching this train wreck for a few years, now, to dip a toe in?

I am seriously out of patience with this run-around, and the misinformation someone is evidently feeding the rest of the org. Whoever first suggested that opening up pull requests alone would open up development in some meaningful way? Lied.

And if there was no active misinformation, then I'm sorry but chalk up another mark for incompetence. I'm honestly not sure which I'd prefer.

Comments

[synecdochic]

To be scrupulously fair, it's fairly uncommon in the OSS world for projects to offer a sandbox/hack/webdev/whatever-you-want-to-call-it type system -- pretty much any project on Github, you're going to need to install the code first before doing any serious patching against it and the people who frequent Github are already used to doing that kind of thing. (I believe DW was the first project of any significant size to offer that kind of setup, although I couldn't swear to it.)

That having been said, though, those projects also tend to have better install docs -- somebody I know did try to get the Archive software up and running recently and said it wouldn't have been possible without her experience. Mind you, the DW code is also a stone bitch to install and we don't have very good install docs either -- the Dreamhack service actually sprung from the fact that it was more cost-effective in terms of time, effort, and energy for us to script the install process than to try to talk everyone who wanted to hack on the code through the install, since it's the kind of thing that you need a specialized skillset for -- but we do at least handle things like dependencies gracefully and we've improved the process considerably from where it was when we forked.

In most cases it basically boils down to, it doesn't matter what programming language you're using, anything that was created as a webapp using the LAMP stack (or one of the other webdev languages like Ruby) is going to be a stone fucking bitch to get installed on a personal computer running Windows or MacOS, because the underlying setup's just so different. (Easier on MacOS, because MacOS is Unix under the hood, but easier still isn't easy; Windows, though, is always going to be really fucking hard.)

I do think there's definitely a touch of magic pixie dust thinking going on, though. Experienced developers don't just magically appear just because your project's on Github (or Sourceforge, or Ohloh, or Freshmeat/Freecode, or CPAN, or whatever OSS hub is popular at the moment) -- you have to actively recruit them, and you have to make the process of contributing pleasant, process-light, and low-effort. This is ... somewhat antithetical to the OTW's method of doing things, and I don't think the two can be reconciled.

[branchandroot]

*nods* I got started on Wordpress with a local install, but WP was /built/ for that. And had a fairly well-structured forum where you could go and beg for help. (Which help I'm kind of entertained to notice, seems to have migrated largely to Stackoverflow, but hey; whatever works.) And even so, my "local" install was on my paid webspace, not my desktop! MacOS Apache is a bitch and a half to deal with.

I wouldn't have touched a local install of LJ or DW with a ten foot pole. *laughs* I downloaded the zip for a look, once, and backed off fast. AO3 isn't actually that bad, in comparison, but the lack of documentation in any public place pretty much puts the kibosh on wanting to try an actual install. So, yeah, by that measure, "experienced", here, pretty much means "has run their own installation of a really complex app before/is an active sysadmin".

And those people are going to show up, why? Because it's so very rewarding to be an overloaded worker-bee? /heavy sarcasm. The black-box nature of the organization is really, really working against recruitment of /any/ coders.

Cat doors, people, we need cat doors installed!