[TYPO3-dev] Contribution to community extensions

[Xavier Perseguers]

Hi Philipp,

> Many big open source projects work with Gerrit (apache, eclipse, android, 
> etc).
> The Gerrit UI *is* terrible.
> The workflow is rather simple. Create clean patches to submit, push them, 
> get a change ID, add it and push again (or use the commit hook to push 
> directly).

That's the point I mention to my answer to Jigal a few minutes ago.
Workflow of squashing / amending commit is something that is simple when
you get it but something that most (GitHub) users are not used to. As
such, I'm considering this Gerrit workflow exactly something that *is*
complex, at least that looks like so.

>> That's a key point for an opensource community. We are alive because we
>> have contributors. So we need to take a lots of care to ease the
>> contribution wall that we have currenty. I speak about Gerrit but also the
>> CLA.
>>
>> About the CLA why enforcing a CLA for submitting a patch ? When we can per
>> exemple require a CLA is that patch can be merged after review. That's
>> less frustration for the new contributor.
> 
> CLA is a legal requirement and as such not up for discussion. The only thing 
> we can discuss is the workflow required to acknowledge the CLA. I like the 
> drupal way to just hit a checkmark in your user settings for this.

TBH I really don't get the point of this CLA. I've the feeling that
without clear statements from law / advocates, "we" (not us...) invented
CLA and other stuff but without knowing if it is really needed in case
of a conflict. I may be totally wrong, this is really my personal
feeling but I agree that the CLA is hindering contribution, even if you
ease the agreement workflow, this will still hinder potential
contributors from quickly providing some fix, just because they wanted
to gently fix something and don't want to bother with signing papers
(even electronically), agree to complex terms, ... for fixing a typo
somewhere.

Thankfully CMS Core did not introduce this, that's a chance!

Kind regards

-- 
Xavier Perseguers
TYPO3 CMS Team Member

TYPO3 .... inspiring people to share!
Get involved: http://typo3.org