A few suggestions to attract contributors and make the project more robust

wetneb commented 5 years ago

Hi!

This project is great! It seems to be very advanced, I will try to play with it. If you are interested in growing this as an open source project, there are a few things that could be improved:

[ ] use tests as part of the development, and keep an eye on test coverage. This should be done even at early stages: the later you start doing it, the more painful it gets;
[ ] add continuous integration to run these tests automatically to review changes;
[x] add a LICENSE file which contains the stated license (AGPLv3), this will let GitHub (and many other tools) detect the license of this software;
[ ] use tags and releases to provide the compiled snapshots of the software;
[ ] do not ship dependencies as .jar files stored in the repository: Maven/Gradle can already fetch them from the project configuration. When using an IDE, just use plugins to integrate with one of these build systems. That makes Eclipse project creation much easier (the configuration is directly derived from the build system config);
[ ] use informative commit messages, which link to the issues that they solve. For instance if you add "Closes #123456" in your commit message, this will automatically close the corresponding issue.

These little habits should make development much more pleasant, and they will lower the bar for other contributors (be they from your team or external).

wisnesky commented 5 years ago

Welcome to the project! I have added a license file. Let me speak to a few of your other points:

There is a "self-test" menu item in the IDE that runs all the built-in examples and checks for exceptions. It would be great to extend that test to capture row counts and also integrate with e.g., Travis CI.
A few folks (most recently @phreed, aka Fred, who I can't seem to tag here) have created maven/gradle configuration files before, but they are out of date. It is indeed better to use maven to fetch dependencies, but even with those scripts working I like to keep jars in the repo, even if they aren't used, so that the whole project is self-contained.
We do plan to move to tags and releases (and a signed jar), but the pace of change is still high enough that we aren't quite ready to do that yet. It will probably happen later this year. The IDE does have an auto-update now (this is relatively recent).

There is also this for me to do:

[ ] Comment the code

wetneb commented 5 years ago

Great! But the license you have added is just the preamble that is designed to be added as header to the source files, I think. It is generally expected that you put the full text of the license: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt This way GitHub should detect it more easily.

wisnesky commented 5 years ago

Oh, ok, fixed!

wetneb commented 5 years ago

Awesome, now it registers the license correctly:

CategoricalData / CQL

A few suggestions to attract contributors and make the project more robust #35