HI
Base needs to have some documentation to help devs understand what it's trying to do.
With the other apps it's much easier to have an overview even without having any documentation but Base is a lot more complex. Also there needs to be some discussion between devs and other people to decide what to use instead of java, and the direction to take generally. Apparently the default HqSql back-end is fairly troublesome but there is a new project "MariaDb" that is a drop-in replacement for MySql that might be much better as a back-end. MariaDb is basically almost the entire community that worked on MySql including some of the original people plus a load of new people that joined since the project broke free from Sun/Oracle. Anyway it needs a small team of people to try out different back-ends to see which are viable as back-ends and which might be easiest to have as the default one. Perhaps bringing their recommendation back to steering-discuss to make an informed vote.
As i understand it the current infra-structure is leading to Base gently crumbling away through neglect. Experienced devs steer well away from Base. New ones need to learn more understanding about coding or about Base or about both. Every time an individual joins and is keen to work on some aspect of Base they realise it's a completely tangled mess and they would be the only person working on it so they get discouraged and give-up.
Yes it would be great to have input from the entire devs list but
1. They are not interested in Base
2. The non-coders that want to do non-coding work on Base (eg Documentation, perhaps marketing, perhaps design of aspects of the UI that only appear in Base, the wizards and so on) would be unable to understand.
Regards from
Tom