How you know your Free or Open Source Software Project is doomed to FAIL (or at least, held back fro

[spot]

This was inspired by my recent efforts to look at Chromium, but these are just some of the red flags I generally have observed over the years written down

Comments

How many packages pass that test?

[ext_114082]

It would be interesting to see what the score of most packages would be using that criteria (lets just say that we change the points to +1 per item.)

Re: How many packages pass that test?

[jspaleta]

ha!
Finally an objective criteria to actually organize stuff in the review que.
When searching for stuff to review for inclusion I'd love to list them by FAIL number so I can concentrate my limited time on helping the lower FAIL projects into Fedora.

-jef

Thanks

[ext_109965]

I recently started my first own project, and I totally find some of my mistakes in this list (let me be naive and assume that those mistakes come from my lack of experience in project management).

Thanks for that, I'll sure use it to correct them and try to prevent more kittens from dying :D

[robbat2]

* The source code is more than 100 MB. [ +5 points of FAIL ]
* If the source code also exceeds 100 MB when it is compressed [ +5 points of FAIL ]
I think these are a little harsh on the large successful projects.
- qt-x11-opensource-src-4.5.1.tar.bz2 is 110MiB.
- Lots of the KDE tarballs exceed 100MiB of source code.
- gcc and the kernel these days exceeds 100MiB of source.

* Your code depends on specific compiler feature functionality [ +20 points of FAIL ]
- There's lots of GCC-specific code out there in terms of other compilers being broken. Even the kernel has it.

Your source building options seem hyper-specific to C/C++. Ant for Java projects, setuptools for Python, MakeMaker for Perl are acceptable.

I'd add fail points:
- for building static libraries with -fPIC objects.
- Not using the changelog in the release (worse than not having it I'd say)
- Having the autoconf/automake template NEWS/README files.

[jldugger]

It's only five points of fail. Certainly the scale should be calibrated.

[robbat2]

Maybe normalize size by age of codebase?

PIC static libs

[kevin_kofler]

> - for building static libraries with -fPIC objects.

That's a feature. It allows statically linking the libraries into shared libraries.

[kestrel_shrike]

I'm guessing you're in the dead kittens range ???
I've definitely worked on projects in that range.
Oh, another whole set involves language.
The code is in English but the docs are in Spanish - 5 pts of Fail.
The code is in English but has comments in Spanish - +5 pts of Fail.
The code uses Spanish variable names, but the Docs are only available in English OMG WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING ?

[robbat2]

English, Spanish, a couple of other languages of western and central European descent, I can handle them fine.

But, when it hits Cyrillic written in the Volapuk encoding, then we're into fail range. Or worse, Tamil or various Indonesian scripts.

[reddragdiva]

It's interesting to note that LibreOffice appears more or less to have worked out your list (and spot's list) and is desperately trying to pull the codebase out of its dive.

spot's list includes many ways to make a project into a cathedral, no matter how much it's advertised as a bazaar. It's amazing Mozilla survived long enough to make Firefox, for example.

Congrats ...

[anonymous]

... you just killed most Java code bases. I'm serious. Congratulations!