Re: Nabble is now open-source

Posted by nnako on May 31, 2019; 9:03am
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Nabble-is-now-open-source-tp7603082p7603650.html

Hi Nabble devs,
  hello Franklin,
    hello Raven,

open sourcing Nabble is good news! I have great respect for what you did so far and what Nabble is right now.

I had a look at the bitbucket location and must say, though, that in order to attract people for working on Nabble's source, you should at least provide some basics:

information about system and environmental requirements
It is not necessary to provide every detail about the target server system Nabble must be based on, in order to provide its services to the outside world. But the key hardware and software requirements and restrictions would help a big deal in building a working system at first try.

documentation of a successful installation process
Unless you provide an installation process description, people will loose their time trying to get things running on different systems. In order to avoid this, you should at least provide an installation description which explains how to build up your current configuration. Further systems may follow afterwards.

structural documentation about Nabble's internal concepts
When everything is set up properly, most interested developers would like to have a quick overview about the structure and interconnections within the Nabble source code. I've seen, there are currently 934 source files within the repository. You can not expect highly experienced developers to start probing into the files in order to extract structural information. Rather you as Nabble developers should gather your knowledge and at least try to sketch some basic structural information which make understanding different parts of the internals of Nabble possible. From here, issues can easily be addressed and solved in view of the whole system.

If you leave the project like it is now, the source will probably not be touched at all. At least not by experienced programmers who value their time and can't afford wasting it probing around. That's for sure. Maybe you would get some novice pull requests which have to be discarded anyway, as they are not in line with the overall concepts. And I hope this is not your intention, but to really work on the code base and make it greater.

As GregChapman mentioned, if you want Nabble to become outstanding (invest into its current state), you must win experienced developers who are willing to invest their precious time into this project. And for "winning" those developers, you should start with basic structural information about Nabble. This information should cover questions like:

- how do the different parts like NAML, luan, core, UI, ... work together on a technical level?
- what are the key issues that makes the usage / configuration / development of Nabble difficult
- ...

What do you think?

Regards, and thanks again.
Nnako

GregChapman wrote

THERE ISN'T A README YET
A README file tells people where to start and how to contribute.
...
I fear that unless the current Nabble team actively promote Nabble's new status, no one with the necessary skills will ever encounter Nabble or feel encouraged to join the development team.
...