Since I’ve been on a terrible grouchy-snarky kick lately, I thought I’d lighten the mood a little… not to mention give credit where it’s due.
DSpace’s tech mailing list has gotten a lot better about answering questions lately. I mean, noticeably better. I mean, 100% of questions are getting some answer, and most problems (all relatively trivial problems, at least) are being resolved.
That’s pretty awesome. What’s even more awesome is that it’s not just two or three people stepping up, although certainly the core committer group is making a serious effort. I’ve seen a couple-three responses from people whose names I don’t immediately recognize. That’s great. That’s how sustainable OSS communities happen. I couldn’t be more pleased. (Not surprised, because this group has always had the potential to be a sustainable community. But definitely pleased.)
What’s more, I see folks being more forthcoming about “Yes, I had that problem too.” That’s useful information, and I for one have been leery of sharing it in the past lest I look (even more) the idiot. Pluralistic ignorance bad; shared learning good.
I still can’t get my goshdarn RSS feeds working; I was at least getting some different errors for a bit after I got 1.4.1 running on the test machine, but I resolved those and ended up with the same old errors as always. (It can’t seem to find the Rome RSS library, though it’s in the same /lib folder with the same permissions as everydarnthing else. I’ve even tried recompiling that library from source, in case it was some kind of OS X thing; didn’t help.) I’m on the trail of a Creative Commons licensing bug, though…
