At 04:00 14/1/01 -0800, James Duncan Davidson wrote: >The Jakarta Project encompasses several things. It was created to serve as a >home for Tomcat and a place for many of the java.apache.org projects to >land. Ant isn't really part of the raison d'etre of Jakarta, and never was. >Now that it's received some degree of success, it's time for it to breathe >on its own and not under the Jakarta project where it can be forgotten. > >There's a couple of alternatives to this: > > 1) Ant could become a top level Apache project -- on par with > Jakarta, httpd, apr, xml, and others. Or, somewhat related > could form the seed for a new project that dealt with > software dev tools (like the tinderbox stuff that Sam has > worked on).
I like the idea of tools.apache.org (well okay a sexier name would be better). >> What exactly is encompassed by "day to day operations"? Does it include >> technical decisions and directions? As each Jakarta project has a group of >> committers, for whom there is already a decision making framework, could >> not this group form the leaf of the "responsibility hierarchy" If this is >> not the case, then what is the role of the committers in decision making? > >Day to day operations is pretty much defined as just that. Read the ASF by >laws for an idea. Process, procedure, direction, goals, etc. > >When all of the committers are in agreement, it's easy to say that there >isn't a need for a "leader". However, when you have things like the Tomcat >3.x --> 4.x happenstances where not everybody is willing to go with the >decisions that have been made, then you really need a person with whom the >"buck stops". How much say does this person have. If they disagree with decision X can they claim that the group never reached a consensus and then overide them. Leaders are only accepted if they earn the position and continue earning the position. Trying to institute forced leaders (ie non-benevolent dictators) is one sure way of killing a project. You keep comparing yourself to famous benevolent dictators but you are not even vaguely comparable to them - You abandoned the project and then came back. When you came back you did some atrocious things, insulted a whole bunch of people and generally lost the respect of the group. The successful benevolent dictators are inclusive and want input generally while you had a "vision" and anything outside was "wrong". Your continued developement of Ant spec outside ant-dev with your own copyrights splattered across them makes me even more reluctent to trust that you have the best intentions of Ant at stake. Cheers, Pete *-----------------------------------------------------* | "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind, | | and proving that there is no need to do so - almost | | everyone gets busy on the proof." | | - John Kenneth Galbraith | *-----------------------------------------------------*
