Re: [Jython-users] Summary of Paul's post with some comments

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

Walter Chang wrote:
> Excellent thoughts....I'll try to getting some time this weekend to
> answer in full over a nice cup of coffee :)

Thanks. By the way, one other thing I should have mentioned from a 
stigmergy point of view is the importance of a move to something like 
Subversion for source code control, because that will make it easier both 
for others to contribute and for alternative branches to be made as new 
experiments.

So, when you look at Frank's strategy:

1. Get the web site refreshed to attract more users and so hopefully some 
more Jython internals developers (*)

2. Get Subversion in place to allow developers to more easily contribute 
and to allow larger and more radical experimental changes to be made more 
easily to the code base (since branching and reorganizing directories in 
CVS can be a pain),

then those two things make a lot of sense as priorities from a stigmergic 
point of view, even if they aren't directly adding new code. So, I think 
they are very good investments in the future of Jython and moving it forward.

(*) By the way, as a rule of thumb, as most projects go, one out of ten 
casual users might become serious users (and answer newbie questions), and 
one out of ten serious users might get really good enough to contribute 
libraries (and answer questions by serious users), and one out of ten of 
those contributors might get interested and able to contribute to the core 
system (and answer questions by library contributors), so a project might 
need to interest 1000 casual users to get one core developer. Obviously, 
the exact ratios depend on the nature of the project and so on (might be 
more like one in 100 for some), but what I am trying to bring across is 
this notion of various levels of users who are making different 
contributions to the whole community process -- wipe out the two 
intermediate levels of serious users and library contributors, for 
example, and you are left with a situation of overburdened core developers 
trying to answer newbie questions, and no group of people who could easily 
step in as developers if the need arise. So, it is important to have those 
base levels happy to feed into the higher levels. And then of course, you 
have the 80/20 rule -- 80% of the core contributions are going to be done 
by 20% of the core developers, but it is important to have them all 
because there is a learning curve even among core developers, and you 
never know for sure who the big contributors will be next year. So based 
on that, with about 5 core developers now for Jython, and one doing a lot 
of the work, I'd guess there are about 5000 casual Jython users out there. 
:-) Still, I doubt many projects can manage more than a dozen or so core 
contributors, so it may be that once projects get to about 10000 casual 
users or so the numbers may not matter much.

--Paul Fernhout