[ckan-dev] Issues/Questions/Cry for help.

[Ross Jones]

Hi Matt,

> On 14 Jan 2016, at 12:56, Matthew Fullerton <matt.fullerton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Great mail Ross. From my experience I largely agree with Steve; it is also a slightly technical problem: useful changes for CKAN core or popular CKAN extensions often lie buried in the potential contributor's own "catch all" extension and have to be extracted, accepted into the upstream code, reinserted and then removed from the private extension. This is a lot of boilerplate work and so it just ends up never happening. Its also sometimes much quicker to work around an existing problem than really tackle the root cause (a very recent example was the activity list count in the dashboard: nobody removed it from CKAN core while it was causing a massive problem, solving the problem was not trivial, but the main problem (long response times) could be solved with a template change if you were happy to live without the count display... easy to see what someone pushed for time will do).

I totally agree, I've done this myself in the past, even after I've been through the learning curve.  But then my time (and others) contributing to core is limited by what goodwill our employers give us. If we don't do *something* to help more people contribute, this won't change. I'm totally open to suggestions about how we do this.

By private plugin, do you mean 'only used by us' rather than 'private'? I was a bit disappointed to see the European Data Portal decide that the AGPL was optional recently :( 

> One thing that occurred to me right now is that contractors can maybe try and orient themselves better with the CKAN roadmap - that ought to be a virtuous circle: show clients the roadmap and get them excited about where CKAN is going, then they might be more interest in aligning their needs better with the roadmap and new code then gets written and contributed to the right place.

Sounds like that could be really useful.  Any volunteers?  I guess we'd want to go through https://github.com/ckan/ideas-and-roadmap/issues and see which are most popular.

Cheers

Ross.