Are JBS' policies flexible enough to welcome the JavaFX community?

[Ryan Jaeb]

I was very hesitant to start such a negative discussion as my first post to
the openjfx-dev list.  The recommendation to use bugs.sun.com played a
large part in making me think it was necessary.  For someone like me,
bugs.sun.com is a "go away" page.

The instructions for contributing, at least to me, give the impression that
only participants that intend to become an OpenJDK (code) committer should
be asking to become a contributor.  The policy that only gives authors
write access to JBS reinforces that interpretation.  I find myself thinking
"that's not my role in the community" and I go away.  The contributor
instructions I'm referring to are here:

http://openjdk.java.net/contribute/

In my opinion, any process that starts at bugs.sun.com is going to reduce
the number of people contributing JavaFX bug reports.  I understand the
need for a well defined process, but, once that process tips to the point
of being bureaucratic or cumbersome, voluntary contributors are going to
quit volunteering (or never start in the first place) or invent their own
process.

A good example of what I mean is that it takes "at least two weeks" to
process the OCA.  If people have the choice between signing the OCA and
waiting at least two weeks to participate, or visiting a mailing list and
participating immediately, the official process doesn't matter.  Instead of
moderating the bug tracker you'll end up moderating the mailing list (or at
least trying to).

I also think Richard is being generous with his estimates.  29% retention
on 2346 bug reporters means 680 people have to end up with author status in
JBS.  The hg churn extension (`hg churn -c`) shows me 134 people with
commits to the openjfx repo right now.  I think that's a good indicator of
the number of contributors that are capable of, and interested in,
attaining author status.  It's not unreasonable to think that 90%+ of
JavaFX bug reporters are like me; they're contributing bug reports, but not
code.

I've never used the hg churn extension before, so I would appreciate if
someone is willing to double check the comitter count I've given.

Ryan Jaeb


On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 9:46 AM, Richard Bair <richard.bair at oracle.com>
wrote:
>
>
> If there is a way for people to comment on their issues but they just have
> to go through bugs.java.com instead of JBS if they aren’t authors, then
> it isn’t as big a deal, but I thought (and I could be totally wrong) that
> bugs.java.com was basically fire-and-forget for the submitter. In this
> case we’re alienating nearly 3/4 of our community.
>
> Richard
>
>
>