Re: [eigen] random thoughts -- we need more Gaels

[Rui Maciel <rui.maciel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Benoit Jacob wrote:
> Obviously we've just had the least active month or two in recent Eigen
> history. While that can be attributed to the summer and the subsequent
> busy back-to-school time of the year, that isn't all. We need to
> organize to scale better, and to get more people to step up as more
> core contributors.

If the project needs more developers then the current members should focus on 
attracting fellow developers to this project.  That means investing some time 
doing fundamental stuff such as making the source code readable and writing a 
decent (and in some cases, any) documentation.  Or, to put it in other words, 
make the project more developer-friendly.

Just to point out a couple of fundamental issues which Eigen fails to address 
and therefore makes this project a bit unattractive to developers, the source 
code is practically void of any comments and there is absolutely no resource 
that presents to the potential developer a general picture of Eigen's design, 
algorithms employed, adopted patterns or even any of the development 
conventions which were adopted by this project.  Those issues constitute a 
massive barrier to entry that forces practically all developers to shy away 
from reading the source code, let alone invest some time contributing to this 
project.

So, if the project needs more core developers then it must focus on making the 
project attractive to developers.  If this is achieved then contributions will 
simply roll in with time.  If not then odds are that if anyone looks into 
eigen and finds that it is missing some feature  they need then, as getting up 
to speed on Eigen's code is such a massive undertaking, they will either adopt 
some other library or they will invest (or waste?) their time writing yet 
another linear algebra routine that offers support for their corner case.


Rui Maciel