Rails
This started as a comment on Geoff’s post but seemed to justify knocking the dust off this thing.
Apparently there are some people who feel that it’s ‘impossible’ to get patches into rails and that the core team doesn’t communicate with its user base. As someone who spends a lot of my time helping others contribute to rails I find the ‘impression’ hard to reconcile with my own experience. We have an active mailing list and irc channel where discussion takes place almost every day.
In the 2.0 effort we’ve received patches from 177 different individuals ranging from minor typo fixes, through to entire new features. So if you’ve got some killer ideas to contribute, subscribe to the core list and start talking about them. 2.0 is almost here, but there’s plenty of scope for new or improved functionality in rails.next, and we’d love to hear from you.
Rails 2.0 has had several profiling-driven optimisations we found by benchmarking real applications rather than hello world apps. Named routes were a common source of slowness in big applications, so 2.0 has new code that makes them several times faster. Repeatedly parsing Dates and Times from database also contributed to performance problems, so we have code to cache the results and for good measure we made the parsing faster too.
I’m not saying we’ve solved all the problems, or that rails is now perfect. No framework is! If you have an idea for improving performance, and a profiler report showing it makes a big difference, join the irc channel and lets talk about it, we’re always open to ideas.
Like any open source project rails depends on you, the community, for contributions. If you have something you feel like fixing, jump on in!
Jeremy McAnally October 13th, 2007 @ 01:58 AM
I really appreciate yours, Rick’s, Marcel’s, and Jeremy’s involvement with the community, and DHH’s and ulysses’s (sorry forgot his real name) activity on Trac (and of course Sam and Tobi and Thomas involvement with their projects). This has greatly improved since RailsConf, and I really appreciate you guys’ willingness to “change” (not the right word but it’s early) to accomodate your users. Two things, though.
The first thing that’s always kind of piqued my curiousity is why there are two core members who haven’t committed anything in something like 2 years (not an exact measurement but I went back through changesets a while ago and it was something like that). Are there any plans to replace them with more active members?
Secondly, I don’t know if this post was a reaction to my comment or not, but the “impossible to get patches in” part seems to be aimed at my comments about how Rails operates differently than other OSS communities. But it’s true. In other projects this size, you’d have a core team, each of which handle a different “aspect” of the project. DHH would be driving, with Jeremy and whoever else handling development of new features. These two people would interact with those members of the community interested in that part of the project. You and someone, say, Rick would handle all incoming patch work. Then Marcel would head up documentation, where anyone who wants to write documentation would work closely with him to get it just right. Things would delegated to the community but lead by the team. As it is, it feels like to get anything done, you have to do it on your own with minimal collaboration from the core team, even to suggest a new feature (every time I’ve seen that come up, the response is typically “Where’s the patch?”). Of course, this is one person’s perception, and I think your deeper involvement in the community has certainly changed this significantly.
All that is to say, I think you guys are doing great, but as the project grows, I think perhaps the structure needs to be made a little more horizontal. Just a suggestion. :)
Jim October 13th, 2007 @ 02:44 AM
Plugins are the Darwinian way to acheive the sort of planning that you’re talking about. Even core members release possible new features as plugins first, too, and don’t put them into trunk until they prove themselves (Rest Helpers, CSRF, etc). That has seemed to work out well so far – and it’d be hard to switch to a more hierarchical roadmap process since no one knows what they really need until they’ve used it.
It doesn’t get more horizontal then the plugin ecosystem.
Geoffrey Grosenbach October 13th, 2007 @ 06:50 AM
To clarify, my post was about the public perception of Rails, not the reality of the Rails codebase.
I think the new patch submission process is a great idea. I personally participated in a patch for a Capistrano Git adapter and it was amazing to see the improvement in the patch as it was discussed and enhanced by several developers in a Trac thread. Within a few short days, Jamis accepted it.
The problem is, how do we communicate those positive qualities of Rails to people who will never browse Trac or open an IRC client?
Koz October 13th, 2007 @ 09:37 AM
@Geoff: I hope this didn’t come off as some ‘denouncement’ of your post ;), the public perception is a completely different issue and I realise your post was addressing that.
How we address that is a whole other issue and one that’s outside my expertise. However I wonder if our own perception is colored by the people we associate with. I meet people every day who’ve just ‘heard’ of rails and I the last guy who was negative about it was some time in February. There are definitely people out there with a chip on their shoulder, justified or otherwise, but I don’t know that they represent the majority perception at all.
@Jeremy: Some of the core team members are less active than others, but those of us who are active are currently keeping up with the workload. With the new patch review process we’ve been using helps other community members get involved where previously a core team member’s involvement would have been required.
I’m not sure if we’ll ‘restructure’ the team any time soon, but we certainly intend to recognise people who contribute on a regular basis.
groustors March 2nd, 2010 @ 05:06 PM
I do think this is a most incredible website for proclaiming great wonders of Our God!