Re: Renting Developer time to advance 1.3/1.4 - anyone want to chip in?

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 12:47 PM, Jeff Kowalczyk <..hidden..> wrote:
> On Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:03:22 +0100, Ed W wrote:
>> I am interested in renting some time from someone like Chris (or
>> similar) to advance progress of the next branch and get it "stable".
>> Would anyone else like to chip in?  I would be happy to chip in 1-2,000
>> EU as a starting point - perhaps a couple of other business could put in
>> the same or more (I'm only a one man company - come on folks!) and we
>> could rent a month or two of full time labour to get some serious
>> progress done on this?
>
> I won't presume to speak for the core devs, but I gather the limiting
> factor is time availability for the people with commit rights.

To a large extent, that is a big part of it.   One big thing that has
helped speed things up has been greater contributions in time and code
from the community (though this has also largely increased the amount
of work scheduled for 1.3....)

>
> That said, I myself have floated the idea of community funding several
> times on #ledgersmb.

If people are up for it, my own schedule is fully booked for a little
while, but my business is expanding and adding people to help with
LedgerSMB so I am open to the option.

>
> Like Ed W, I'll gladly join any round of community funding that advances
> the 'basic science' parts of LedgerSMB. I think these are the same rough
> spots whose repair gets deferred when the core devs must implement
> paying-client work.

Actually, that isn't the only issue or even the major issue.  What
usually gets neglected, unfortunately, is bugfixes in stabe branches.
:-(

When we began undertaking the work of a rewrite, I was a strong
proponent of getting the core architecture code and framework right
before moving the financial logic.  The reason is that if your contact
database has issues, this can be fixed without raising too many red
flags, but if your financial data is messed up, that is a bigger
issue.  I would rather have us cut our teeth on somewhat less critical
aspects of the software and then, the next branch out, hit the
fiancial logic.

A second problem is that a lot of issues require some time to gather
requirements, look at options and build working models for them.   I
am a big fan of not rewriting code until the time is right.  This
means that we have to be patient and not rush into massive changes to
critical parts of the application.

The news is not all bad though-- I don't think we had any non-core
code contributions in 1.1, we had a couple in 1.2, and we are having
some important contributions from outside the committers in 1.3.  In
general, we are seeing increasing community help, though this is
largely limited to portions of the application that have been
rewritten (anyone who has taken a close look at the codebase can see
why!).  While things are moving slowly, we are actually picking up
steam.  1.3 is for better or worse a very ambitious release.  I think
that 1.4 will go even further in getting community-supported
contributions.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

>
> Jeff
>
>
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