How can the community better support IfcOpenShell / Bonsai development?
Hi everyone,
I've been using IfcOpenShell and Bonsai BIM heavily for a while now, both at work and for a Scout camp planning project, and I'm really grateful for what the maintainers have built. It's genuinely changing what's possible with open BIM workflows.
Lately I've noticed that the pace of development seems to have slowed down a bit. Browsing the GitHub repos, I see a number of open PRs, including some pretty small ones (bugfixes, typo/type-error corrections, minor cleanups), that have been sitting around for quite a while without review or merge. I want to be clear that this isn't a complaint. Maintainer time is finite, the project is huge, and I have a lot of respect for everyone who contributes.
What I'm wondering is:
is there something the broader community could do to help take some load off the core maintainers? I'm thinking about things like triaging issues (reproducing bugs, labeling, closing stale ones), reviewing small PRs so a maintainer only needs to give a final ok, helping with CI or test coverage so trivial PRs are easier to trust, working on documentation, or whatever else is currently a bottleneck.
Is there a documented process for becoming a more active contributor, or is there an informal way people can pitch in? I'd also be curious whether the maintainers have a sense of where help would actually be most useful. Sometimes "here's free labor" creates more coordination work than it saves, so I'd rather ask than assume.
For context on what I could realistically contribute: I work as a BIM Manager with IFC daily, I'm comfortable with Python, and I've done some small contributions to Bonsai before. Happy to start with the boring stuff.
Thanks again to everyone keeping these projects alive.
Cheers,
Christoph
Comments
I definitely encourage you to contribute.
What to contribute to?... i would say, just scratch your itch. If you use Bonsai daily, I'm sure you have situations where you thought, 'this could be improved'... start there. :)
Although, like you say, there's currently a finite number of competent maintainers to review PR's, the following 'bleeding edge' build allows you to use proposed PR's right away, https://docs-unstable.bonsaibim.org/guides/development/installation.html#bonsaipr-bleeding-edge-installation
I use this branch basically daily now. Through use, i catch bugs in the proposed PR's, that in turn give the maintainers a little more confidence in pulling.
...
And there's also contributing financially, as well. :)
https://opencollective.com/opensourcebim
The core development has slowed down on Bonsai itself, because since a month ago we discussed about some core issues in IfcOpenShell and pivoted. There is a lot of work being done, but it's hidden in branches and local dev. There is a bit of trust here - that although it isn't great on the surface to pivot, that the things we're building are really, really fundamental for IfcOpenShell and Bonsai's future.
Outside that, BonsaiPR lets people use the PRs without waiting for merging into the main branches.
Timeline-wise, I expect within a few weeks for the first public builds for the datamodel and ifcviewer branch demonstrating what we've built to be available.
Now that we know (thought there may just be some JSON hiccup with updates or so)
I totally welcome any backend improvements.
No problem at all. Bonsai development was and is frightening fast though. No hurry, I like a pause :)
OK, so a short break only. I am already excited though.
Take your time !
For the past month I've been keeping a slow but steady pace. I haven't committed much because most of the work has been refactoring and testing the snapping system. In general, I'm still developing things around the snap and polyline tool. My main goal is to make them more reliable, so I can then expand their use to other tool and explore integration with parametric gizmos.
@bruno_perdigao Thanks for all the work to all the devs. All the back-end work is a really important foundation for everything else, but these bonsai tools are the "visible face" for the wider end-users. Keep them up, very welcome additions.