State of Pidgin: Attracting and Maintaining New Contributors

[Kyle Daniel]

So, having recently dove into pidgin/Libpurple I hope my perspective can
help.

The point was made that the vcs is far for the biggest issue for new
contributors and I whole heartedly agree. I also think it is not as big a
barrier to entry as one might expect/think.

This basically got me going, nbd.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/get-started-with-sourcetree/work-using-mercurial-847359064.html

Do I think it likely easier to grow pidgins development community using
git/git*- yes. However, I also believe that a good community easily
outweighs what vcs and host are used.

Gary was awesome and helpful while I was trying to get going, even though I
highjacked his stream a few times ; ) .So I didn’t mind learning a bit of
mercurial to get involved.

Now, I just couldn’t get any traction trying to overcome the obstacles I
faced ones inside the code base.

My 2 cents without getting too philosophical about one vcs or the other.

On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 11:27 AM David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 2017-10-03 at 10:11 -0500, Gary Kramlich wrote:
> >
> > I'm not sure what you mean by adoption here.  I'll assume you mean
> > entry to contribute and leave it at that.
>
> Indeed. But let's set aside the VC discussion completely. I didn't want
> Matěj to get shouted down unanimously, but it doesn't look like there's
> actually much point in us tilting at that windmill.
>
> > That said we have much bigger problems than that right now.  We don't
> > need a million drive by contributions that people aren't going to see
> > all the way through.  We need people that are going to stick through
> > the entire pull request process and hopefully continue to be involved
> > in the project.
>
> Those drive-by contributions are where *everyone* starts. Those are the
> seeds from which everything else grows.
>
> We need them, but we *also* need to focus on the "conversation rate" —
> where we convert the drive-by contributors who just wanted to scratch
> their own itch, into repeat contributors and members of the community.
>
> Maybe we're just saying the same thing in different words, but your
> focus seemed to be slightly disparaging towards the one-off
> contributor. We need to *encourage* those and then encourage them to
> stay, not say "you stick around and become a long-term maintainer, or
> we're not interested". Which is how I (perhaps mis-)interpret your
> choice of words._______________________________________________
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