Contributing to Open Source projects

[brad]

Prior to joining Google I always joked that Google was the black hole that swallowed up open source programmers. I'd see awesome, productive hackers join Google and then hear little to nothing from them afterwards. When I joined I decided I'd solve this mystery and post about it but it's been over 2.5 years and I've been busy and somewhat

Comments

[ingulf]

"I'm sure most companies have more internal consistency in tools & processes than the collective open source community."

ROFL!

DOAP

[anonymous]

Great idea. I had the same thing in mind about a year ago.
You can find my ideas about a distributed development system
using already existing semantic web technologies here:
http://turbo24prg.github.com/distributed-development.html
---
TL;DR:

PLEASE use structured and linked data, so people can actually use it mechanically and build tools on top of it. Thanks!

There's the DOAP project, developing a RDF schema for describing software projects: http://trac.usefulinc.com/doap/ . You can find a good description at: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/doap.xml

There are already many projects using it, e.g. http://pypi.python.org/pypi and launchpad.net (even including maintainers).

[ext_224280]

Like this?
http://www.openlierox.net/wiki/index.php/Development

Did that a while ago already. :)

Ack otherwise to the post. Whereby, personally, I don't remember any project where I had problems to find the most recent trunk code.

[brad]

Curious: what OpenID URL did you start with such that LiveJournal or Google gave you such an ugly URL here? Do you have a public Google profile?

[mart]

I think that's what you get if you use the originally-documented identifier-select (or "directed identity") flow. Presumably Google OpenID is stuck with those URLs now because if you change them then folks won't be able to access their existing accounts...

If you choose to "Sign in with Google" on TypePad we assume the identifier http://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id and get the same sort of result.

[quadhome]

A page that lists all of the registered projects?

[pinterface]

Submitting patches? In my experience, that's the easy part. "The ... code review tools, ... submit queues, continuous builds, test bots, documentation, and all associated machinery and processes", on the other hand are practically non-existent. Shoot, I'd be thrilled if most of the projects I end up patching had outdated documentation and half a test suite because that would be an improvement. (Common Lispers are particularly bad in this regard, which isn't really helping my lackluster documentation and testing habits. :/)

Speaking of all that fancy stuff you guys have to make hackin' easy, is that documented anywhere for general public consumption? Because that, I think, would be an interesting read.