I'd be excited to see couchdb-lounge make it in as a subproject, especially if the overall goal is to incorporate features from the lounge directly in to CouchDB. Making it a subproject seems like a good intermediate step in that direction.
On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 11:34 AM, Chris Anderson <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 10:19 AM, Noah Slater<[email protected]> wrote: > > On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 09:55:34AM -0700, Chris Anderson wrote: > >> I generally agree with those principles, although I think we can get > >> away with being informal about them at least at first. > > > > Creating a project as a sub-project of Apache CouchDB is a necessarily > formal > > affair, and on that we can't easily go back on without a lot of pain. > Blessing > > something as a sub-project will have massive implications for the > community > > around it, and around CouchDB proper. > > > > While I think there is some obvious value to be found here, like with > Django, I > > think that we need to think about this seriously before we accept any > projects. > > If if we decide on a criteria for inclusion at some future point, that > excludes > > some existing sub-projects because we were in a rush to add them, then we > are > > going to have a bit of an awkward problem on our hands. > > > > Does the ASF have any guidelines for this? > > > > Is there any ASF lore that we can fall back on for guidance here? > > I think a shared understanding of our values around subprojects (and > more generally) is important. But I'd be quite happy to bring in > sub-projects on an ad-hoc basis. > > So often it is a mix of the people, the code, and circumstance that > makes one project stand out for inclusion. Trying to apply the same > reasoning when bringing in all/any sub-projects doesn't seem > necessarily productive. I *do* agree with you that we should talk > about how to make the decision to bring on a sub-project. I just think > that we should treat them on a project by project basis. > > I liked the Django quotes you posted. I'm pasting them again here: > > == > > I think that we have a lot to learn from Django about selection here: > > http://jacobian.org/writing/what-is-django-contrib/ > > Just to summarise in quotes: > > "contrib packages should be removable." > > "anything in contrib needs to be generally accepted as the Right Way to do > something for a large majority of users." > > "contrib packages should solve problems encountered frequently by > real-world > web developers." > > "Good contrib packages tackle issues that that are not trivial, are > bikeshed > prone, and are difficult to get right for the common case. We want to > prevent > folks from needing to decide among seventeen different session frameworks, > for > example." > > "there’s a danger in bringing something into the core: it stifles future > innovation. As soon as we “bless” a contrib package, we drastically reduce > impetus to write competing libraries. So, a good contrib package should > have > general consensus, and should be fairly mature." > > Would we need to adopt the same thinking? > > > -- > > Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater > > > > > One thing all the projects we've mentioned have in common is a > polyglot of languages. I think it will be healthy for CouchDB to have > a few languages represented in the distribution. > > Now that I think about it, QueryServers might make a good sub-project. > It would be a good way to involve people from the Erlang / Ruby / > Python, etc communities to contribute to CouchDB. Now that we have a > test suite for query servers we can afford to keep contrib versions of > them in more than one or two languages. I'm not proposing we refactor > this out immediately, but it's the direction I can see sub-projects > going. > > I'd love to hear what other people think about sub-projects in > general, or if there are other projects we haven't mentioned that > would make good sub-projects. It would be helpful to have some obvious > "that's not a subproject" candidates as well. > > Chris > > > > -- > Chris Anderson > http://jchrisa.net > http://couch.io >
