[vtk-developers] Driving away your existing developers

[Biddiscombe, John A.]

I deliberately put this into a different thread from the attracting new developers conversation.

If I were kitware, I'd be concerned that developers like myself - who kitware couldn't care less about - are unable to contribute to the project, and as we leave, the next generation of interns and students are not being encouraged to join.

Why? Because tools like the gerrit review system have made it so painful to get patches accepted that it is easier to simply maintain our own branches in private repos and not try to get them into master.

Why? Because kitware has become a vtk/paraview dictator and pushes all its own patches and restructures the libraries and code whenever and however it wants.  Those of us outside kitware who are not paying customers and who do not have time to chase down reviewers can't get anything in. I do not object to Kitware being a dictator, after all I can fork the project and do anything I want with it too, but making it so hard for anyone else to get in is hurting the project, and since our patches need to be maintained against a changing master where our branches get broken often, it gets harder and harder with time to get features accepted.

Last year my intern and I created a large patch/branch with significant new features (2D transfer functions) which just sits in gerrit and will never make it into a release. In the old days, I'd have committed it, watched the dashboards, created tests and made sure it smoothly transitioned into a release (and others would have chipped in with fixes when something on the dashboard broke). I don't have the time to check it still builds against the changing master branches and I know no one else will either. Having to manage gerrit branches/reviews for separate VTK/ParaView patches is hard work and most of us don't have the time to do it (our job is actually not to maintain vtk/paraview/etc).
We created a video and posted it with public calls for reviewers on the lists, but did we get any response? No. If we can't get reviewers from the general public, then we can't contribute. End of story.
VTK http://review.source.kitware.com/#/t/3736/
PV http://review.source.kitware.com/#/t/3737/
9 months. No reviews.

Another sad thing is that although I have other nice plugins for paraview which provide useful features others could benefit from, they will never get into the main repo, Kitware will eventually create their own versions of them (c.f zoltan/metis partitoners), thus duplicating the work - and at the same time making our stuff redundant.

Normally, I'd accept that I'm just a whiner and tell me to shut up. But I/We really made an effort to get help with the transfer function stuff and the evidence is that nobody cares - so my whining is justified.

Kitware does do a great job of moving the project forward - it's a shame that outsiders can't.

JB

--
John Biddiscombe,                        email:biddisco @.at.@ cscs.ch
http://www.cscs.ch/
CSCS, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre  | Tel:  +41 (91) 610.82.07
Via Trevano 131, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland   | Fax:  +41 (91) 610.82.82

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