Hi all,
don't know whether the community@ list already has a lot of subscribers, so I'm taking the liberty of crossposting. Asbesto suit on :-)
In the heat of the discussion, it appears to me that Brian's idea of switching to SourceCast as the underlying administration system for administering ASF resources has been put aside (or postponed, or gently ignored, whatever).
Related to that, I'm stuck with a similar hardware/infrastructural issue being somewhere in between infrastructure and incubator.
I have been doing some preparation (and hardware/bandwidth acquisition) to support open source development on top of Cocoon. We (some Cocoon-friendly people) have acquired a box specifically tuned and set up for Java/Tomcat/Cocoon web hosting, and baptized it http://cocoondev.org/) - very similar to http://www.mozdev.org/about.html
The idea is to help people develop and showcase Cocoon-applications. The reason why we did this, even though an xml-cocoon2-apps module exists, is that people do not only need CVS access and mailing lists for growing a project and its community, but also the possibility of showcasing what they have done. Hence the current emptiness of the xml-cocoon2-apps module. This is currently very difficult to achieve with the available ASF equipment - for reasons I understand.
At the same time, we lower the barrier for people willing to become part of cocoondev.org, and potentially be a migration path (similar to Nicola's Krysalis) to proper ASF projects.
Already, we have a number of candidate projects wanting to move in (while equipment is still being set up to mirror the setup of the Apache boxes as close as possible) - but now I'm wondering how we could interrelate/cooperate with the incubator idea.
While we offer everything a project might need (CVS/shell accounts/ezmlm/Tomcat/Cocoon/DNS), we don't require a project to host everything on our hardware, they could as well have their sourcecode in some incubator CVS module, run mailing lists on ASF equipment, and only have a showcase/demo running on our equipment.
On the other hand, we would like to see fellow Cocoon-developers help each other along and form a community on their own, while still maintaining the noise level on cocoon-dev/[EMAIL PROTECTED] to a minimum - since those should be related mostly to the development and use of Cocoon itself - not the apps build on top of it.
So what I'm basically stuck with is defining some kind of liaison with the incubator project, specifically with Cocoon-based projects in mind. Maybe it's too much of a niche from the ASF POV currently, but since interest for Cocoon has been increasing dramatically over the past year, I reckon a number of those Cocoon-based projects will be starting the search for "project development and showcase" infrastructure RSN, and I would like to welcome them to http://cocoondev.org/, while not alienating them from the ASF community in the process, and making the move to incubator as easy as possible.
I'm not too confident on the road I should take. Having an A record alias of the form cocoondev.apache.org might establish some sort of credible branding of the initiative, ensuring our users they won't be alienated from ASF. Copying the incubator guidelines verbatim as our own guidelines might also be a way to move forward, but might confuse users on who is actually leading/sponsoring the initiative.
I'm not sure, but I expect other community-led initiatives like this might exist for other Apache projects - and I'm wondering how we could eventually be recognized under/banned from the ASF umbrella. Tigris.org comes to mind.
Does anyone want to comment on this?
Regards,
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
