Hi,

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Karl Wright <[email protected]> wrote:
> The nature of this project is unique in that only a few committers are
> interested in any given connector.

This is very similar to the concern we used to have with Tika, that
most people are only really interested in a narrow subset (i.e. a
specific file format) of functionality. This in fact did turn out to
be true for most contributors and committers, but the fact that they
still need to cooperate on the core of shared code was enough to form
a working community.

> An approach I've been trying to use is to have at least one committer
> per connector. [...] So, as I've discussed before, the criteria for becoming
> a ManifoldCF committer has to be more nuanced and must take domain
> knowledge into account, if we are to have anything like a committer base
> that covers all the code.

Agreed. There's no need for everyone to know every bit of the entire
codebase. In fact there's probably no reasonably sized Apache project
where any single committer is intimately familiar with all bits of the
project.

So from my perspective anyone who knows ManifoldCF well enough to
implement a new working connector or to make substantial patches to an
existing one is well above the entry barrier for committership.

Let's get enough of such people actively involved, and we're ready to graduate!

> I guess what I'm arguing for is a somewhat different set of graduation
> criteria that is more suited to ManifoldCF's unique situation.

As mentioned above, I don't see this situation as too unique within Apache.

Growing beyond just a single active committer can be pretty
time-consuming and frustrating, but the benefits are worth it. I'm
sorry that the Incubator collectively and I personally haven't so far
been too helpful in making this process easier. Hopefully we'll be
able to help make the ride better from now on.

BR,

Jukka Zitting

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