[Tfug] A New Poll

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 02:11:33PM -0800, Joshua Bernstein wrote:
>How about a new Poll,
>
>	I suggest "How Many Open Source Projects have you directly 
>	contributed code to?" By contributing code, I mean code or patches you've 
>created have made it into the currently available (or at some point 
>general) release. I'd also like to see some talk about what project you've 
>submitted code to and what you've done. Also, I'll note that thte OSEF 
>and other TFUG related projects shouldn't count as I'm sure we are all 
>familar with the efforts...
>
>-Josh Bernstein

Okay, since nobody else seems to be biting, I'll give it a go:

Most of my contributions have been to my own magnum opus (at least, up to this
point in my life), Weasel Reader, an "e-book" reader for Palm OS.  I started
it in the Fall of 2000.  Since then it's grown quite a bit.  Over the
lifetime of the project there have been about 100K downloads... I suppose that
might, on a good day, translate into maybe 10K users... but I've not done any
use study.  In 2003 it won a first place award at Les Trophees du Libre.  The
award was even presented to me by Richard Stallman.  I have to imagine that he
would have been happier if my free software were not for a non-free OS.

Despite its popularity I've found it exceptionally hard to round up additional
coders.  There have been a handful of patches nearly all of which I have
accepted.  And people are happy to offer thanks or suggestions.  The largest
group of people I've got to help have been the translators.  Weasel is
available in eight languages now.

I think the fact that the program is for Palm OS puts off most people who
might otherwise contribute.  In reality, there are probably many additions and
fixes which could be made with only a small understanding of the OS specific
stuff.  I think the largest single patch was from somebody who wrote a
hyphenation algorithm for the text display which makes use of the TeX
hyphenation libraries.

Let's see... other than that... I've only contributed fairly minor patches
here and there.  Usually to fix small bugs.  I just don't have a lot of time
to get up to speed on somebody else's sourcecode.

It is in that respect where a lot of projects could use improvement.  Comment
your code people!  Most recently I was playing around with the very nice
rootvis plugin for XMMS.  It uses way too much CPU.  I've got some ideas for
improving it but I gave up when I looked at the code and found zero comments.
I could certainly study it enough to make my changes, but if the code had been
properly commented I would have been able to accomplish the task much faster
and it would have actually been done.  I know in my own code I've placed
frequent comments.  Nothing too anal, but it should be at least descriptive.
I've had one or two people say it was nice, but I've never gotten feedback
from somebody who was actually trying to modify the code.

Oh, and I once had to edit one of the Linux kernel's network drivers beacuse
of some stupid card from Linksys where they changed the chipset but didn't
change the PCI ID.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, UMass Amherst student
                        Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
Try Weasel Reader for PalmOS  --  http://gutenpalm.sf.net
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood
of my enemies!"
        --Sam of Sam & Max