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dc42
Actually there is collaboration in the development of RepRapFirmware.

You sure had to write this :-)

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dc42
I've helped others to port RepRapFirmware to other boards (Due/RADDS and Alligator) and merged their changes back into my github master. Likewise when somebody wanted to add support for IDEX on CoreXY machines, I did some restructuring of RepRapFirmware to make it easier for him to add, and I merged his changes back into the master when he had completed them. I did the initial support for SCARA printers ...

... which pretty much means you do all the hard work yourself, right? Users dump some coarsely working code blob, dc42 fires up his code editor and gets it fixed and into shape. I mean, if you like doing things this way, I certainly don't want to stop you. Such centralized open source projects work very well for many companies. I even followed this path with Teacup Firmware myself for a while.

Still that's not the kind of collaboration I tried to talk about. With Git, Gcc, whatever, contributors get a message "might break that other use case, please prove that working, then try again". Maintainers do some whitespace fixes at most.

As soon as contributors deliver readily usable code working for everybody, projects start flying. That's the point where the fun begins!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2017 12:56PM by Traumflug.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

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Traumflug
Still that's not the kind of collaboration I tried to talk about. With Git, Gcc, whatever, contributors get a message "might break that other use case, please prove that working, then try again".

That's exactly what I have done on a few occasions. I don't accept changes that are obviously buggy or break the coding standards. But mostly, other contributors to RRF have submitted high-quality code that I haven't needed to change.

PS - I wasn't expecting to get such high-quality contributions. Perhaps I have been lucky to get good contributors so far.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2017 02:05PM by dc42.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

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dc42
Perhaps I have been lucky to get good contributors so far.

Looking at the Github repo I see all commits were done by you, with only few exceptions. Perhaps we simply have different expectations on what "collaboration" means.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Some of the commits are merges that I did in response to pull requests. In other cases I pulled in other contributors' code manually to avoid the need for a 3-way merge. However, it's true that I make most of the changes, because in effect Duet customers are paying me to continue developing the firmware, so I can afford to spend more time on it than other contributors.

Do you have in mind a free-for-all in which anyone can commit anything? That sounds like a recipe for chaos to me. IMO you need either one person or three to be in control of what is accepted and when.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2017 06:02PM by dc42.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

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dc42
Do you have in mind a free-for-all in which anyone can commit anything? That sounds like a recipe for chaos to me.

Picking up patches by 'git am', 'git cherry-pick' and/or merging all preserve the original author, so they stay visible.

Regarding the free-for-all: Teacup does this and it works remarkably well. The only rule is "Create as many branches as you feel need for, but don't touch other branches without asking". Then you have these contributions in branches, which are much easier to handle than remote forks. One can rebase, cherry-pick, view diffs, fix details by interactive rebasing, quickly switch between versions, all such stuff.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

FWIW, I contributed on another (non-3Dprinting) project a while back. The guy who maintained that root archive controlled things totally. It did mean that when you submitted stuff, you often got back a terse rejection message about quality. And that put off a lot of potential contributors. OTOH, when you *did* work with the code, and figure out the right way to do things, everything was rational and it was easy to add your bit.

Spinoffs didn't seem to fare as well as the original project.

Should I get Bowden or derect drive?