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[Orgmode] How you can help


From: Carsten Dominik
Subject: [Orgmode] How you can help
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:35:46 +0200

Hi Org users,

I need to get control over the time I spent on developing
Org-mode.  Recently, I have again worked too hard on it, spending
more time than I should, in order to get 6.9 and 6.10 out and to
seize the chance to get the best possible version into Emacs
23.1.

However, this is getting out of control, and I am now putting
myself a hard limit of 1 hour per day, clocked by Org-mode, which
will clearly cut in on my development speed and posting rate.

Here is how you can help me to make the most of that one hour.

1. If you report a bug, please try to do as much work as you can
   yourself.  Before you send it, think if you have collected all
   the information you can.  There are great examples of good bug
   reports on the list already.  The best bug reports are, of
   course, those that are accompanied by a patch.

2. If you are reading the list and see bug reports, consider
   putting in 10 minutes, trying to reproduce this problem
   yourself, and maybe adding information that might be useful
   for me to track down that bug.  Again, this is already
   happening, I am only trying to encourage this type of
   behavior.

3. I have recently spent much time on fixing bugs in parts of Org
   that I did not write myself, so this is taking much more time
   than usually.  If you know Emacs Lisp, and I know there are a
   number of excellent Lisp programmers on this group, consider
   "adopting" one of the following subsystems.  By "adoption", I
   mean that you make it your mission to deeply understand this
   part of Org, so that *you* will be in the position to fix
   bugs, taking that off my shoulders.

   - org-publish.el.  I think the biggest bugs are out now, but I
     am sure this system can be improved quite a bit.  If you are
     that Lisp programmer trying to take up this task, consider
     teaming up with Sebastian Rose who is a great guy, has quite
     some understanding of that system and good ideas about it,
     but just is not enough of a Lisp programmer to really take
     that on.

   - org-export-latex.el.  This is a tough one because you need
     to know both LaTeX and Lisp.  And the code is complex, in
     part because Org-mode allows to write LaTeX is a relatively
     lazy way.  Bastien has done a great great job capturing this
     into an exporter.  However, there are still problems and
     bugs, some came up recently on the list.  And Bastien
     currently does not have the time to contribute consistently.
     As a result, I have started to fix some bugs, but this is
     really eating too much of my time.  This subsystem can also
     use feature additions, for example better handling of image
     insertion, maybe with captions.  I have ideas about this, so
     talk to me if you want to help out.

4. Try to answer as many messages on the mailing list as you can.
   I have been trying hard to make sure that each and every
   reasonable question on the list (and this is really the only
   kind we get in this amazing community) will be answered.
   Doing this still takes a significant fraction of my Org-mode
   development time.  I will clearly spend less time on this in
   the future, in this way also giving others more time to
   answer.  Again, there are already quite a few people who
   regularly *answer* questions, and all I am trying to do here
   is encouraging this activity.

5. Help developing the Org-mode FAQ by adding useful information
   to it yourself.  All you need to do is to get acces to Worg,
   which will help getting to know git in the process.  Worg is
   meant to be user edited, so please go wild and add information
   and links at will.

Thanks to you all, for your understanding and help.

- Carsten





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