Yesterday a fellow developer had a problem with a well known very big open source project. He tried to get support from that project, but nobody answered. It was one of those tools installed on most Linux servers – but the community wasn’t able to answer simple questions.
The Padre IRC channel window was next to his IM window when he told me and I was thinking about Padre support.
The Padre support channel (called #Padre on irc.perl.org) is open 24/7, and there are about 45 people and one or two bots around, but at least some of them are always alive and ready to answer questions.
There are two facts that gave us this high reachability (I think):
1. Our developers are all around the world
Some Australians are really pushing Padre, including Alias who did 16% of the core code and waxhead, our current release manager. We got some few US guys and a strong European and Middle Eastern group. Most of them are online and usually happy to help users when they’re at their desks.
2. Padre is a working tool
This is true for many open source things, but Padre is something you use everyday and – compared to tools like “less” or “traceroute” – you recognize it. Many people use Padre for working, it’s always visible while it’s being used – compared to Apache or syslogd that are hidden if they’re working probably.
Some people using Padre also open their IRC client or the Mibbit web-based IRC client for joining the Padre support, asking questions and answering others.
Give us a try
Padre is a complex IDE. If you try it out, you’ll likely have questions or maybe even problems. Feel free to come to our support channel and ask your question. It might take some minutes or even half an hour until someone replies – as many people are busy with work – but I guess you’ll get your answer. And you’re welcome to stay there and spend a minute on answering a question of someone else.
