On 30 March 2015 at 06:10, John D. Ament <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 9:34 PM Peter Ansell <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On 29 March 2015 at 11:57, John D. Ament <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > Great question/comment! I always look forward to this part with new
>> > podlings.
>> >
>> > On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 5:32 PM Peter Ansell <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >> That is fine with me.
>> >>
>> >> I am not overly fascinated by internal Apache infrastructure though so
>> >> I would like to keep the .travis.yml file and the references to
>> >> coveralls if possible as there is nothing broken with that system
>> >> right now for CI and code coverage.
>> >>
>> >
>> > It's weird that you feel this way (from my point of view).  Part of why
>> > projects seek out the ASF is to leverage the infrastructure in place
>> that's
>> > provided.  It's generally expected that the in house services will be
>> > leveraged.
>> >
>> > http://www.apache.org/dev/services.html
>>
>> That perspective is very reduced these days by the free set of
>> services that non-Apache projects generally rely on these days.
>>
>> Ie, a project can (and virtually all of my other projects that I am
>> active with do so) run quite comfortably just with free (for open
>> source code) providers:
>>
>> * GitHub or BitBucket for code hosting, wiki
>> * GitHub for HTTP hosting and possibly issue tracking
>> * Free Jira issue tracking license and hosting on Atlassian
>> Cloud/OnDemand for OSS projects
>> * TravisCI for continuous integration
>> * Sonatype OSS Nexus repositories for snapshots and releases
>> * Coveralls for code coverage
>> * Google Groups for mailing lists
>>
>> In reality, the main reasoning for going to Apache is probably solely
>> the brand these days, which overcomes the administrative overhead in
>> the case of mature projects, or in our case, fairly short-lived
>> projects (in terms of active development, we want to maintain a
>> consistent core after a short term of stabilisation).
>>
>
> I think this is the most troubling part of your post from my point of
> view.  One of the things we need to be extremely careful about in the
> incubation process isn't the fact that people are consumed with the Apache
> brand.  If the goals here are simply to get the name Apache put in front of
> the project, it's probably not going to grow that well.

We don't expect a community to grow around the code itself, which was
part of the reason for wanting it to be located within the broader
Commons community in preference to a TLP. The reasoning is that there
will be minimal changes to the APIs which make up the code, once it is
stabilised, by design. Other than the pure Java interfaces which make
up the API, we only have a single implementation that we will be
developing against it. The only reasoning for having the simple
implementation is to check the contract tests against a system that
has no dependencies and is produced for the sole purpose of being a
test harness. Given its status as a test harness, it doesn't need to
be optimised, but it does need to fulfill the contracts, so if the
contracts change, the test harness will need to reflect the change.
Once the contracts are finalised, the simple implementation will be
basically as static as the APIs.

Part of the reasoning for starting out on GitHub was to attract a
broad initial discussion, which, before we had a dedicated mailing
list here, wasn't as simple as GitHub Issues and PRs for collaboration
and quick commenting on the overall design. Since everyone has GitHub
accounts, but not everyone wanted to subscribe to the deluge of emails
going through the commons dev mailing list, it was the logical
solution for the initial discussion. In addition, we had two
approaches to the commons community last year but both seemed to fail
during negotiation on the point that we required a dedicated mailing
list inside of the Commons TLP, which is why we ended up here in the
Incubator, essentially.

I am personally ambivalent to whether this project is hosted within
Apache, to gain the brand recognition, or whether it exists on GitHub
as an independent project there, but the other main contributors
heavily favour Apache and are fine with handling the administrative
overhead that comes with that choice.

> While it is true there are many services out there to leverage, we're
> expected to use Apache services.  That doesn't mean solely Apache
> services.  You can use Travis, Coveralls, Cloudbees, GitHub wiki, etc all
> you want.  One limitation we do have is that you can't download binaries
> from those sites that don't point to an Apache mirror'd location.

That sounds fine, although I thought that Apache didn't have any
control measures around binaries, with all releases only formally
containing the source, with the binaries incidental? We will be using
Maven Central as the main point of access for downloads, so that
should be fine, given that every other Apache Java project also does
that.

Cheers,

Peter

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