[vtk-developers] Driving away your existing developers

[Berk Geveci]

You are both absolutely right. The review process is broken when it comes
to accepting patches from the community. It is broken in 3 ways:

1. As Kitware, we haven't put the right attention to reviewing contributed
code from top down (i.e. me and other managers using project resources and
asking developers to review contributed work). Even when we have specific
projects under which this can be done, we favor developing new code to
reviewing contributions.

2. As individual contributors to VTK and ParaView, many of the Kitware
developers are focused on their primary goals. We haven't built the open
source community spirit as well as we can. Part of this needs to be done by
the larger community with encouragement by senior folks (not just ones at
Kitware).

3. As others pointed out, there is not enough emphasis and encouragement in
reviewing code by the larger community. My code would languish in Gerrit if
I didn't have the ability to walk to someone next door and ask them to
review it please. David Gobbi and others had suggestions on how to
encourage the larger community to be more involved in reviewing.

My opinion is that this all boils down to making people feel ownership for
VTK rather than seeing it as a tool that needs to be patched as necessary
for other work or some project goal (deliver x,y and z and you are done).
This is not something I can easily force people to do nor is it a top down
thing. I am doing my best by encouraging more community engagement,
removing barriers from tools and setting an example by contributing in
various ways. I'd like to hear suggestions on how to achieve this and what
I can do towards this.

One idea: more community hack-a-tons. I just sent out a suggestion for
addressing issues in the bug tracker. Why not have another one for
reviewing code?

One final note. Everyone please keep in mind that while there are quite a
lot of contributors to VTK, certain parts of it are developed by only a few
people. Core pipeline: I am it at this point. Rendering: by next year, it
will be Ken and Marcus. Imaging: hardly anyone in the scientific vis team
at Kitware does anything with imaging filters. We update them when we make
changes to the pipeline or data model but that's it. So some of those are
maintained and developed by others or they are some orphaned. This can only
be addressed by either encouraging new (or existing) developers to take
ownership or by removing those components all together.

My 2 cents.
-berk



On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 8:37 AM, Ronald Römer <rroemer at gmail.com> wrote:

> You are absolutely right, in most of your points. None if my commits were
> previewed by any native kitware developers. Its a pain to find the right
> previewers and after that none of them will do that job. So it is very hard
> for a new developer from outside the organization to get the right
> attention. This is frustrating...
>
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