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

[niqaeli]

Hahahahahahaha!

*wheezes*

Good job I've written off the AO3 and the OTW at this point! I feel sad for the good people getting chewed up by the godawful organizational disaster but not sad enough I'd touch that org with ten foot pole. Aiiiiiii.

[pineapplechild]

It's kind of a pity, because I seriously think Ao3 is one of the best archives I've used, but the organization running it seems to be a train wreck. Or a bag of cats.

[mitsuhachi]

There ought to be some way to communicate with the people in charge here. Like, I refuse to believe they'd put so much time and effort into something and then KNOWINGLY put their own ego and control issues ahead of the projects basic well being. Like...can't someone call bullshit? If its that all obviously bullshit?

[jennyst]

"Is no longer officially supported on every possible combination of operating system" is not the same as "won't receive any help or support". I've edited to try and make that a little clearer.

Thanks for continuing to look at this - being challenged is good for us. Please do remember, though, that Dreamwidth also has some form-filling, so I don't think it's fair to ask for them to be entirely eliminated.

[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.