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

Thu Jan 14 16:13:55 UTC 2016

On 14 Jan 2016 2:43 p.m., "Ross Jones" <ross at servercode.co.uk> wrote:
>
> 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 :(

I mean the former, not private in the licensing sense. CKAN extensions tend
to be so heavily based on what has gone before that I feel like we have a
duty to give back to the community.

>
> > 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.

I've already added it to a draft agenda for a workshop I'm meant to be
running in a month or two :)

Best,
Matt

>
> Cheers
>
> Ross.
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