Nicolas George wrote:
> Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487f760c$1@news.povray.org>:
>> I do not recall the POV-Ray 3.6 source code having vanished from Earth any 
>> time in the past since its initial release.
> 
> The 3.7 source code, on the other hand, was not there. You know it
> perfectly, as you know that this is what I am talking about.

It does not matter for a willing contributor.

>>> Do you not agree that, in order to attract contributors, you need to make
>>> them feel welcome?
>> Yes, I agree that every team member needs to greet all contributors with 
>> flowers personally.
> 
> That is not what I am talking about.
> 
> If you happen to be wondering why there are so little contributions to
> POV-Ray, just look in a mirror: that is precisely your attitude that makes
> them go away.

My attitude? - In how many open source projects will the following attitude 
ever work: I am new to the project, so first I tell the existing developers 
all they do wrong. Then I claim that I am the over-expert in some field, 
i.e. parallel programming, and hence when I come I expect all developers to 
drop everything they are doing to support my major changes to their program.

On the other hand, in how may open source projects has the following 
attitude ever worked: I am a developer new to your project. I saw you have a 
few open bugs. Here are small fixes for those bugs. Further, I have some 
suggestions for more substantial improvements, would you like to hear them?

> Please note that I am not accusing you: you have a total right not to want
> contributors. But in that case, be coherent: do not pretend you want them,
> and do not pretend your project is open.

I am not pretending! I am just saying what you would hear in every other 
open source project: We expect developer to first show their ability before 
we would like to invite them as regular contributors. With such an 
invitation come certain rights, i.e. repository write access.

> If, on the other hand, you actually want contributors, then you should as
> soon as possible set up a public developers mailing-list and current source
> code repository. And then be patient, as you have quite a lot of bad
> reputation that needs to be forgotten.

Just because we don't want contributors like those who contributed to the 
Debian OpenSSL "fix" does not mean we don't want contributors. But fact is 
that ten monkey on typewriter contributors are not worth half as much as a 
single competent contributor who actually knows what he/she is doing.

If that makes us having a "bad reputation" in your mind, well, then what, 
for example, reputation does Debian have left about the quality of its 
contributors?

With POV-Ray we are talking about a ray-tracer, and several of the 
algorithms require (US) graduate-level math to just understand heir basics. 
Add the ability to program in C++ on an advanced level, and soon the number 
of potential contributors approaches one to zero :-(

	Thorsten

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