[rdo-list] RDO Contributor Survey - results

[Rich Bowen]

A while ago we asked you to participate in a contributor survey for RDO.
I've written up the results here:
https://www.rdoproject.org/blog/2017/05/rdo-contributor-survey/

Below I've included the full responses to the open-format questions.



First, we asked how difficulties were overcome when encountered. The
responses were:


Asked on IRC

With the great help of the community

Asking​ other members

I didn't, gave up. Contribute directly to TripleO now.

asking on IRC

Ask on IRC

With patience

Discuss with people

Helpful engineers in IRC

Packstack

Have had to learn by hard knocks for getting packaging changes figured
out how to get them in and how to get them reviewed and merged
Discussing on freenode, #rdo

Generally just ping enough folks on IRC, or hack and slash my way
through packaging contributions.





Next, a more open-ended "Do you have further comments on the
contribution process?" got the following results:


Some use cases for packagers are not totally straightforward

Would love to help with documentation and see and participate in a
dedicated group to provide great RDO documentations

Make clearer where repos are located, how changes procedure works (need
bugs, backport policies, etc)

The RDO website needs paring down to a minimum. Too much old information.

the processes seem to change very often. no value in learning the
process, it's necessary to read the docs for each contribution (and then
ask, because docs are outdated)

I'll mostly comment on the process to add a new package to RDO because
that's the area where my experience was not so great. The documentation
was fine, the tools also, the only thing that bothered me was the slow
review process. I think most of the frustration boils down to the lack
of reviewers with only 2 peopleo who could approve new packages changes
at the time (I was told this has changed).

The biggest mystery to me is packaging. I'm trying to learn, but it's
like drinking from a firehose. So far I've had to rely on others to do
all packaging tasks.

Some maybe less frequent processes could receive a bit more of
documentation (just an example: how to handle same version of RPM tagged
in more repositories, etc)

Reviewing the current set of documentation, and making it clear where to
start, and how to contribute from start to end, would be a huge
improvement. A lot of the time the issue is less around the actual RPM
building, and more around the tooling and finding where the start point is.


-- 
Rich Bowen - rbowen at redhat.com
RDO Community Liaison
http://rdoproject.org
@RDOCommunity