Re: Open source : race or teamwork ?

[Pierre Phaneuf <pp@ludusdesign.com>]

Evan Dudley wrote:

> In any project there should be a parcel'ing of the work load and
> this should become as public as the code,so people don't duplicate
> efforts. but, maybe I'm just blowing smoke.

Personally, I see many open source projects stating on their page "if
you want to work on something, just tell me so I know who's doing what",
or some other comment to the same effect... Other times, you're just
expected to read the mailing list and notice when somebody says "I'll do
this".

If you want to take a random shot and make a patch without telling the
maintainer, you're taking a chance. Not a really big chance IMHO, it
happens very often that for small contributions (like small bug fixes)
that you just make a patch and send-and-forget, because it didn't take
much time to do.

But before coding a big thing that will require more than a few hours of
programming and testing, you should look around for a maintainer...

-- 
Pierre Phaneuf
Ludus Design, http://ludusdesign.com/
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. Then you win." -- Gandhi