Re: Discussion About Community Contributions to NetBeans

Tom,

While I agree that Oracle is pouring goodly amounts of funds into the
NetBeans development efforts, which is very much appreciated, clearly,
the funding is not at a level that allows *all* desired functionality
to be paid for, otherwise, we would not see some of the results of this
issue cropping up.  And, I believe it's unrealistic to think that this
could ever happen, given the cumulative diversity that could currently
be said to be available.

There are plenty of examples of bugs that have been reported that
simply get grouped together and classified as 'wontfix' because there
was not time to go and really look at the issue and either verify and
fix or determine it's already been dealt wtih, as documented in
comments on one of Geertjan's blog entries, and, this is after all why
plugin code is dropped from the core deliverables - because they don't
have sufficient resource funding to keep maintianing everything
forever.

But, if there really are a million or so users of NetBeans IDE, if only
1% of those 'users' actually contributed bug reports, but even better,
contributed patches, that would be a huge improvement over where things
seem to be now.

I wonder - If that number of people contributed patches, would the gate
keepers even be able to keep up?  in fact, I think we already have the
answer to that question, in the way the groups of bugs mentioned
earlier are being set to 'wontfix'....	

I believe there are two fronts that need to be worked on:

- bug reports on existing packaged functionality that the Oracle funded
developers are actually interested in working on (but don't let that
stop anyone submitting a patch - in fact, it's probably preferred, as
it makes the job of the Oracle folks that of verifying the result
rather than having to cook it up themselves as well)

- patches for those plugins that are *no longer actively being
developed* or maintained by Oracle funded developers.

I am curious - for those plugins that are no longer actively developed,
who are the gatekeepers?  If I submit a patch for Visual Web, who signs
off on it and gets it into the trunk and then builds and promotes it to
the plugin catalog?  If this is documented anywhere, where is it?

all the best,
peter belbin.