Re: [jdt-dev] General discussion about community (Re: Telling GitHub to

[Stephan Herrmann <stephan.herrmann@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks, I think it helps to have this spelled out explicitly.

Three comments:

Past:
In my understanding we owe the precious assets of what is JDT today mostly to 
the efforts of an excellent team (with sub-teams per component). Most of my own 
involvement happened as a member of a team.

Current changes:
I have an itch in my nose that much of this cultural change is happening 
"accidentally", as a consequence of a switch of technology (which was not the 
free decision of JDT). That's why I raised questions that to some looked like 
purely technical in nature, but should be seen with a flavor of discussing our 
culture. I personally prefer explicit choices over accidental ones :)

Future:
If the "community" approach wants to prove its superiority, it will have to 
tackle some hard challenges. JDT is not only about adding some nifty usability 
features at your leisure, but JDT *must* keep pace with the release schedule of 
new Java versions. For each new language version, support in JDT starts with 
heavy work in the compiler. If that fails, all fail. During the last cycles, the 
Bangalore team (sic) has heroically shouldered that task, with lots of overtime. 
There have been Java releases, where the power in Bangalore did not suffice (8 & 
9), but in those times the team grew until we were able to complete the job. I 
don't know what will happen when/if, e.g., Project Valhalla will hit the release 
ramp. I'm not sure JDT - in its new setup - will survive that. Who would want to 
use a Java IDE that doesn't support the latest versions of Java? For quite some 
time my offer to train a new compiler engineer has not seen much response. 
Generally the community doesn't seem to be very keen on compiler maintenance. If 
the community wants to prove my worries wrong, they better accept this 
challenge. There is a possibility of terminal failure.

good luck,
Stephan


Am 13.09.22 um 08:40 schrieb Mickael Istria:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 11:40 PM Stephan Herrmann <stephan.herrmann@xxxxxxxxx 
> <mailto:stephan.herrmann@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>
>     That's why
>     I'm more and more reluctant to use the term "team".
>
>
> I think it's fair. I personally have tried to avoid that term for a while, 
> preferring "contributors", "committers" or even "community".
> A team is supposed to be a pre-defined set of members, organized, unified 
> towards common goals, obeying to some team lead who gives directions everyone 
> has to trust and follow... It's not what community OSS is about; we kind of have 
> the opposite with diverse people can participate or not on their own schedule, 
> obeying different agendas, different goals and different priorities and not 
> always capable of fitting into a wider organization; there is no unified 
> leadership as no-one is contractually allowed to mandate someone else to do 
> something; and so on.
> I do believe this "disorganized" approach is actually more powerful than a team 
> as it can reach differnet goals than what a team (usually with 1 common vision) 
> can focus on, but it's indeed not really manageable, it's more "navigable" in 
> the sense that the community is more an environment or an entropy -that one can 
> try to influence, but not one can mate- than a set of manageable resources.
>
> My 2c
>
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