How can I improve my first OSS project

Question

Hi,

I am still visiting school and will finish my exams next year. Since two years I am working as (the only :-( ) in-house dev for a company providing financial services to Laboratories and doctors. After spending the first year fixing their existing Application and realizing, communicating and agreeing that it won't meet future requirements i rewrote it from scratch. This is my first LOB application.

I needed a "IEnumerable.ToDataTable()" method to do simplify certain things in the Application. I realized that existing solutions wouldn't meet my performance and flexibility requirements, so i came up with a solution based on Dynamically injected IL code myself.

I thought that this might be a good way to contribute to the community, thats why i asked my employer if i may take some of those code and release it under LGPL. They agreed and that's where my first project is: ModelShredder

Since this is my first OSS project and i am relatively unexperienced with running an OSS project on my own I am asking you for some "best-pratices" and what i can improve on it.

Answer 1

It all depends on if you're going to have a team help you or not. It'll be simpler to start doing it yourself if you have the time if for no other reason than you can work out how you want to proceed without worrying about politics.

For a start, any code used as a framework or a library typically needs to be developed to a much higher standard than what you might write for an internal application. This means you need:

• Sufficient user and developer docuemtnation;
• Unit tests with decent coverage;
• A license;
• Tagged versions in source control; and
• Released binaries and source code with checksums.

Additionally you'll need a method of:

• Communicating your project status (release notes, goals, etc); and
• A means to allow people to raise and track issues.

Google Code (as just one example) can do pretty much all of this for you.

I would also suggest you register the domain name for your project (typically projectname.org for open source). If the one you want is taken already, you may want to change the project name, particularly as there might be cause for confusion.

Answer 2

The google code pages look pretty good to me. You might want to think about adding a support group on Google Groups.