Letting friends into my Kimono

The past month has been reader feedback month at quietlyscheming. I didn’t intend it to be that way, but I’ve been receiving a steadily growing stream of emails from people who have been using, abusing, and improving the samples I’ve been posting here.

Which is great news. Flex development has been exploding of late, and the number of people showing interest in not only learning about but actually creating richer interfaces in their own applications seems to be hitting an inflection point (aside: originally I accidentally spelled that ‘inflexion.’ I think I need a vacation).

But I need some help, and maybe you can provide it. Maintaining this blog, and the samples on it, is really only my night job (to the surprise, and dismay, of my wife and son). My day to day responsibilities as architect on the Flex SDK don’t really afford a lot of time to maintain, fix, and enhance the code I post here. Fortunately, a bunch of really smart developers from the flex community are doing that for me. A whole bunch of those emails I’ve been getting this past month are accopanied by bug fixes and enhancements.

BUT…even keeping up with those emails is proving to be a lot of work. So I’m looking to change how I structure my code here. Specifically, I’d like to make it easier for other people to contribute fixes back into the code for the more popular components like the Calendar, DisplayShelf, Fisheye, etc.

But I’ve never worked on an community project that’s open to outside developers, and have no idea what the best way to do that is. Specifically, I’d like to:

  • open up a source control repository for anyone to pull from (I’ve got a public svn repository right now, but I don’t want to spend time managing users, etc).
  • accept patches in email from other developers that I can quickly and easily review (i.e., with a visual diff tool) to accept or reject.
  • selectively start to open up the source control for other developers to contribute directly without my review.

I’m betting someone reading this has done this before, or worked on a project like this before. Anyone got any ideas?

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You’re currently reading “Letting friends into my Kimono,” an entry on Quietly Scheming

Published:
3.5.07 / 9pm
Category:
Flex