What Would It Take?

[Michael Pedersen]

Some moons ago, I posted a question, but it deserves its own thread, and it's finally time to ask it:

What would it take for anybody reading this post to become a contributor to TurboGears? And I mean in any way. Writing docs, writing tests cases, posting bug reports, triaging bug reports, writing widgets, writing extensions, making any contribution, no matter how small, to improving TurboGears?

I want to know. I want to know if I can provide it. And, if I can, I will. I want to have the community more involved.

We've completed our infrastructure issues. We've gotten the next release out. It's time for us to reach out and try to pull the community back in.

So, what's holding you back?

--
Michael J. Pedersen
My IM IDs: Jabber/pede...@icelus.tzo.com, AIM/pedermj022171
          Yahoo/pedermj2002, MSN/pederm...@hotmail.com
My LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeljpedersen
Twitter: pedersentg

[MattRock]

This has made great strides in helping:

virtualenv --no-site-packages tg211tst
source tg211tst/bin/activate
easy_install tg.devtools
paster quickstart testingapp
cd testingapp
python setup.py develop
paster setup-app development.ini
paster serve development.ini

[Craig Small]

I'm actually looking at using TG for a project I have in mind.  For me the long-term viability is important as the worst thing would be to have something that uses a framework that is not maintained. It's probably worse than not using one at all. I've started writing the project and it's actually nice to write it with a real framework underpining it.

Documentation is for me the #1 problem I currently have with TG.  I hate writing documentation for my projects, so I understand why it isn't done, but it is needed (and from previous emails I can see you think it is needed too). For example, getting a deployed program is impossible for me; I just cannot get it going. As a comparison, I could probably have something done CakePHP going in a few minutes with no troubles at all.

If I do actually use TG, I'd probably contribute. I'm still learning python, but its a trivially simple translation from other languages, so probably no code updates yet.  Documentation is something that most can start on, but it needs to be reasonably simple to contribute that. That's one good thing of wiki's, it is easy to add and change things though there are a lot that is bad with them too. Some of the source of documentation might come from answers on this ML.

Probably what also holds me back is time. I work on many software projects at the same time though luckily most are at a maintenance stage. I'm spending a fair bit of time doing trial and error things to understand what TG and the underlying packages are doing. I'll probably email soon with some places I'm stuck, though I wasn't sure if this was the right mail list.

 - Craig
P.S. Anyone know if the mailing list can be subscribed with a non-gmail account? Everything else goes to my wonderful mutt client!