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You're right, of course, about the documentation being awful. I was actually working on fixing that at the end, but every time I'd spend a few evenings writing
by jamis 18y ago
You're right, of course, about the documentation being awful. I was actually working on fixing that at the end, but every time I'd spend a few evenings writing docs (which was a few more evenings where I didn't get to do what I wanted to do), people would ask questions on the list not covered by what I'd just documented...and I'd get discouraged all over again. Docs help, for sure, and I painted myself into a corner where there was too much to document in the amount of time I could afford to spend on it. My fault.
I actually used a website for handling feature requests and patches (lighthouseapp.com), and it worked great. But even the best tested patch for a known bug still needs review. It needs to be applied and tested locally. It needs an update to the ChangeLog. And eventually it needs to be bundled and released, each new release requiring (at minimum) some release notes and a blog post announcing it.
It was a bunch of little things that got more and more annoying. I would have loved to distribute the load across more devs, but aside from a few who would review patches on specific topics (Scott Chacon, for instance, helped with git issues), it was all me, all the time.
- sho 18y ago"It was a bunch of little things that got more and more annoying." What you need to do is write a script to automate those small but repetitive tasks! I heard about this great bit of software to do that for you called Capi.. oh. I was going to add, I think a factor contributing to the lack of ongoing support you received is simply capistrano's place in the stack. Unlike Rails or other libraries, it very much has a "deal with it once then forget about it" usage pattern, which would seem to discourage ongoing participation. Or if there was some kind of missing feature "blocking" the envisaged deploy scenario, that would create a pressing need to "get this in NOW!" - and then forget about it. The simple position of Capistrano as the deploy mechanism - a critical "bottleneck" through which one must pass but then safely forgotten - could be the reason for the "all me, all the time" dynamic. Anyway, glad to see you don't seem bitter. Good luck and looking forward to future projects.