[reportlab-users] ReportLab open source policy (was "headers and footers")

[Andy Robinson]

2008/9/19 Dinu Gherman <gherman at darwin.in-berlin.de>:

> I'm sorry to see you taking my criticism of ReportLab coding

> style as a personal attack.


Dinu, it's not a personal attack at all.  Sorry if you understood
it that way.  I know our code base is full of untidy things and could
be much, much better if people spent more time on it.

People have to understand that at any time there are 2-3
developers within ReportLab theoretically able to work on
the core code, but all of our 9 employees are working very, very
hard to support large customer solutions which leave us very short of
time.  We generally have the working code and the features we need.
Internally we don't NEED more teaching examples, docs, clearer
docstrings etc. internally because we work in RML not Platypus.   RML
is well documented and has a DTD as a formal API.

In fact if we somehow got 10x more open source users asking questions
and making suggestions but no more contributors to balance it, it
would probably be a bad thing for us as it would dramatically increase
the support burden.

If people want better teaching examples, updated docs and so on.
we really need volunteers to spend time on those things and send
them in. I have asked for this many times and we don't usually get
those kinds of  contributions.  Realistically it may move at a snail's
pace otherwise because it depends on one of us actually getting a gap
in
a schedule.

There is a subversion repository and a mailing list.  That should be all
anybody needs to send in patches.; and we'll give commit rights to
anyone who sends in a few good patches and earns our trust.  I do not
personally believe that wikis and trackers will change the dynamics
that much,
but I'll be delighted if I am proven wrong.


For anyone new to this 7-year-old discussion:  we would really, really
love people to send in test scripts, teaching examples, cleanups
of docstrings, changes to manuals etc.  This is an easy and safe way
to start contributing to any open source project.  Just send stuff to
the list.


Best Regards,


Andy Robinson