Developer/CPW Roll call Results (better late then never)

[Gary Kramlich]

Hey Everyone,

As you'll recall I sent out a survey trying to get an idea of who from the
Developers/CPWs/etc. is still around and willing to help.

As a quick reminder, the survey asked your role in the project, your
declared status, if you were interested in future/more development, and
optionally your name, email, and comments.

The survey was created on 20151216 and ran until I closed it today.  The
last response was on 20151229.  Again, sorry for the late recap.  Overall,
there were 34 respondents in total, including myself.

The breakdown of respondents was 50% Developers, 17.6% Technical User,
14.7% SoCers, 8.8% CPW's, and 8.8% Users.  Some of these numbers surprised
me, especially that there were more responses from SoCers then there were
from CPW's.

​
When asked what people would declare their status in the project: 28.1%
responded that they lack the free time necessary to contribute to the
project; 25% responded with lacking leadership; 18.8% declared themselves
retired; 12.5% responded with not a developer; 9.4% responded as active
(eek); and 6.3% responded with retired but looking to return.

​To anyone watching the project, these number are not all the surprising.
A quick check will show you that there were only 3 active contributors in
the 30 days prior to this survey.  But in reality, the only numbers that
matter are the future status numbers...  These numbers are, I think, very
promising.  4 out of 5 respondents said that in the future they want to be
active!


As I stated in the comments, I will not be sharing them publicly nor
attributing them.  However, there are *A LOT* of people saying we need to
get 3.0.0 out the door, and I couldn't agree more.

I have a ton of ideas to make this happen.  A few of them are already out
there: CI/CD[1], moving our primary repository to Bitbucket[2], and trying
to eliminate our technical debt.

The CI/CD pipeline's entire goal is to help us release constantly.  We've
done one release in the past 14 months now, and although it admittedly went
about as good as I could hope, we still messed up a lot.  We need to remove
the human mistakes from this equation and that's what the CI/CD environment
will do.

Moving to Bitbucket makes it easier to review each others' code and for
others to contribute.  We've done quite a few pull requests so far, and I
don't believe anyone has had any complaints (feel free to correct me).

Finally, this project just celebrated its 18th birthday and, as you may
imagine, it has accumulated an enormous amount of technical debt that is a
huge barrier to entry for newcomers to the code base.  While no one is
criticizing the existence of this code, we have to understand that no one
wants to maintain custom DNS code, or raw socket handling, and so on.  So,
we have been focused on removing that code where Glib and GIO have
implementations.

At any rate, I will be sharing more of my plans in the very near future for
further discussion, and I hope everyone is as excited as I am to finally
get 3.0.0 released!

[1] https://bamboo.pidgin.im
[2] https://bitbucket.org/pidgin/main

Happy Hacking,

--
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>
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