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Comment by kjksf | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunate reality is that Cairo project doesn't want to be helped.

I've been checking Cairo from time to time for a very long time. There was a period of active development because it was used by FireFox and, I think, had at least one dev working on it paid by Intel.

But there's no indication that the project wants your help. See https://www.cairographics.org/ and try to find the part that tells you how to submit a patch. To submit a bug you need to use a mailing list or antiquated bugzilla instance.

Cairo is ostensibly a Gnome-affiliated project as it's used in Gtk. Federico is a big deal in Gnome project.

It's telling that he had to setup up essentially a personal fork of Cairo on gitlab to do any work.

At this point in time, moving the code officially to GitHub (or GitLab) from anongit.freedesktop.org should be a no brainer if your goal is to have contributors.

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You are claiming that Cairo doesn't want to be helped, but your actual complaint seems to be that Cairo uses a development workflow that you personally dislike and see as old-fashioned.

I don’t think the parents complaint is about the workflow as such. There is basically no information on how to start as a developer, giving the impression of a closed cabal. A project that wants and welcomes help should in some way facilitate that: have a page or a section of a page that welcomes contributors, explains how and where to start, how to get changes accepted. It’s fine if that is “please just send us an email, we’ll pick you up there.”, but “how to contribute?” appears exactly zero times on the page.

The guide on how to get started is in the source tree, in a top-level file called HACKING [1]. The idea, presumably, is that anyone seriously interested in the project is likely to begin by downloading and reading the source.

[1] https://cgit.freedesktop.org/cairo/tree/HACKING

I didn't get that impression at all, though. If people want to contribute they only need (1) the source code, and (2) a way to contact the authors. Both conditions are met, so there's really no need for redundant lip service, especially on a minimalist, straight-to-the-point website like that.

Cairo does have a GitLab instance - they seem to be just now getting it synced: https://gitlab.com/cairo/cairo

From the members we can see Bryce "Joined a month ago".

45 minutes ago the last master commit was still from 4 years ago :)

I have invited Federico to this HN thread as we had a bit of an email exchange right before I noticed people had started to comment here.

Now it's the next day and I see Federico did not comment here, but he did send merge requests: https://gitlab.com/cairo/cairo/activity So it looks like the CI will live in the official GitLab soon :)

They talk about patch submission in the downloads page git subsection, and the documentation page welcomes contributions in the first paragraph.

I can't speak for the Cairo project, but some projects prefer there to be a slight barrier to patch submissions to improve the signal:noise ratio. Anyone vested in a well-formed patch should be motivated enough to send an email to either a mailing list or any of the developers found in the git commit history. Reviewing patches takes significant time, so it can make sense to require the submitter to invest a bit of time before consuming yours as maintainer.

Do you think it's reasonable someone would have said the same thing about moving to sourceforge or google code, and how that would have been a bad idea? The reality is services such as this are ultimately ephemeral, and out all the ephemeral things one may want to manage, email and mailing lists maybe the lowest common denominator.

Google Code and and Sourceforge were around for, what, 10 years or so? That would be 10 years of potentially greater levels of contribution. IMO, that's a price worth paying for moving a repo once a decade.

Everything is ephemeral. Take advantage of it while it makes sense for whatever it is that you're trying to achieve.

> To submit a bug you need to use a mailing list or antiquated bugzilla instance.

What is wrong with mailing lists?

A lot of open source projects don't want to be helped, given how hard it is to contribute. I've submitted a few patches to various projects, closing open issues, that still linger as PR's years later.

Or are not able to receive the help in some way. This is mostly a people issue and not everyone is able to manage people effectively.

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