Quoting Costin Manolache <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: Thanks for answering this, it is really helpful.
> On Sat, 2002-11-09 at 04:25, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: > > > Please, let me ask you a few questions. I would be very happy if you or > > others could answer them: > > > > 1) was Catalina voted as Tomcat 4.0 explicitly by the majority of the > > tomcat dev community? > > True. > > > 2) did the above vote take place when Tomcat was at 3.2 version? > > True. > > > 3) is it true that Tomcat 3.3 was released *after* tomcat 4.0 was > > release and that was *not* a bugfix release but an alternative > > development branch? > > True ( released after, not a bugfix - it wasn't a branch but the trunk > for 3.x ). > > Tomcat 3.3 release also had a majority of the tomcat-dev community. > Most people working on 4.0 voted +-0 or abstained - and the same > happened when 4.0 was released, with people working on 3.3 abstaining. > > As I said - the majority controls the name and the release. A majority > of tomcat committers can vote to make a release called Tomcat-anything, > and the release can't be vetoed. There is something wrong here and I hope you get to see it: the community majority can't vote for a revolution *and* vote for new release of the old branch. It doesn't make any difference whatsoever. When a revolution is voted and accepted, no new release which is not a bugfix can be accepted. Period. Why? because there can't be *two* different projects using the same name. > > 4) is it true that at some point and for a while two different set of > > committers were working on two different tomcat codebases and both > > released as *tomcat* because of technical divergences? > > That's also true. A lot of code was shared between the 2 codebases > ( same jasper, ajp connector ) and a lot of ideas were common. Yes, I recognize that but it's fairly obvious: they were doing the exact same thing! > Some thing were very different ( target VM, hooks, size/features > trade-off ). Other things started different but become identical > ( facades for example ). > > That's the whole point of a revolution - to improve the community > and the code. One thing is very sure - we learned a lot from each > other, and that wouldn't have been true if one set moved out. Acknowleged. This is why I think the rules for revolutionaries just work. But this doesn't mean that they can't be improved and this is *exactly* what I'm doing right now: trying to find a way to avoid the problems and negative friction that that tomcat revolution created. > To answer one unasked question - a majority vote on a revolution > branch doesn't mean everyone is required to abandon other revolutions > or the main trunk and work on the new codebase. I *strongly* disagree. After the majority of the community expressed a vote on a revolution, the old codebase *lost* the status of being actively maintained and, in order to continue, should have been filed for *another* proposal, with *another* codename and *without* the ability to make releases. It would have solved *much* of the negative feelings that the tomcat community was spreading around the ASF at that time. > It just means the > revolution is accepted and can move out of proposal state and be > released using the project name. Other revolutions can happen at any > time. I still disagree. The rules of revolutionaries *MUST* (I repeat *MUST*!!!) protect the identity of the project more than they protect the freedom of innovation of the single developers. More than anything else, the fact that two different codebases were *released* with the same name at the same time, pissed many people off (myself included) and created a lot of problems in the users. The rules for revolutionaries had a bug since they didn't specify what was going to happen to the project that was overruled by the revolution. We have to fix this in the future. But the way I want this to be fixed is to avoid the fragmentation of a project identity and Tomcat did exactly that. How do you feel about this? -- Stefano Mazzocchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ------------------------------------------------------------
