On 03/23/2015 05:39 AM, Pierre Smits wrote:
The ASF defines the boundaries by with the projects are allowed to operate
under its umbrella. If a project doesn't want to adhere to that, it doesn't
belong under its umbrella.
If one of its principles or boundaries is community over code and if the
ASF wants that the diversity within the communities of it projects is
reflected in the group of committers and in PMC, how can it then be that a
PMC may have it different and can veto on- and off-boarding of persons of
the other kind?
And by the way: Yes, it is the task of the ASF (meaning every person within
the greater community of the ASF, contributor, committer, PMC member, VP
and etc) to guard that the principles of the ASF are upheld. As it is the
task of the Board to police.
The board doesn't like to be the police.
The "policy" document that is being cited is what is promoted at the
Foundation level as best practice, but individual projects are at
liberty to adopt those guidelines, or not, as long as fundamentals are
respected.
If a project decides not to make a certain individual a committer, the
Board *will not* step in to police that, as you say. It is the project's
decision who will be a committer.
Some projects adopt a "universal committer bit" policy, while others
have specific guidelines for inviting a committer. And there's
everything in between. The board is not going to police this.
Your question - "how can it be" - has a simple answer. Because the board
isn't here to tell projects how to make their technical decisions, and
inviting a committer is at the heart of technical decisions, because it
hands those decisions to a new person. The board is not going to tell a
project how to invite committers.
The board, and comdev, will say "here's how we think things should go",
but there's a lot of room between a mature project like httpd, where
someone has 20 years worth of information to read about how to get
started, and a newer project like, say, Open Climate Workbench, which
requires a deep understanding of climate science to contribute
meaningfully**, which completely justifies different levels of "barrier
to entry" when it comes to inviting committers.
--Rich
** Note: This is a hypothetical example. I don't actually know anything
about OCW. Please don't get bogged down in the example if I'm mistaken.
--
Rich Bowen - rbo...@rcbowen.com - @rbowen
http://apachecon.com/ - @apachecon
