I won't rehash the comments on the more frequent reporting and
shepherding. I think they were appropriately answered already on
general@incubator (sorry if the CC to this list was dropped).
I want to address the notion that mentors or other ASF members are here
to build communities. We're not.
We're here to provide guardrails to try to build healthy communities.
We're here to help with technical challenges in getting your software
lifecycle up on ASF infrastructure. We're here to help with the legal
challenges of software licensing and copyright. We're here to be human
mentors for when there are questions about interpersonal issues or
attracting new people.
We're not here to build the community for you.
At the end of the day, I haven't seen an email to this list that wasn't
a podling report request in months. I actually stopped hounding Ed
personally because it had become a regular thing. There is absolutely no
shame in saying that Gossip is not ready for the ASF. I'd really
encourage you all to take a step back and think about that. I honestly
think moving to Github would make you all much happier, and, an eventual
move to the Incubator again later, would be that much easier (knowing
what goes into it).
On 7/5/18 1:00 PM, Edward Capriolo wrote:
The challenge with this process is Apache claims to be about "building
communities", but you do not have great tools to do that. A number of
apache projects are propped up by some for profit company who just pays
people to work on that thing all the time.
I asked for 3 months (normal reporting cycle) to re-evaluate and have a
legit chance at re-bootstrapping. I go to write up the report (which are
now suddenly due every month that no one discussed with me). The report due
July 4th a US holiday. I go to write the report find a convo in the
incubator about how people want to close up the podling because they can
not even wait to see if I actually get the report in or not.
Meanwhile the project had this "shepard" who never signed off a report and
his first interaction with the ML was to vote on shutting down the podling.
Great job "building communities".
On Thu, Jul 5, 2018 at 12:50 PM, Josh Elser <els...@apache.org> wrote:
Hey Ed,
I think taking Gossip back to Github is the right decision. The Incubator
is designed to support, long-running, low-activity projects like you
outline. The regular reports on progress become a time-sink because there
isn't the expected level of volume or participants.
The incubator works well when there is an established community of folks
who are active. Like you say, this otherwise becomes a burden on you (the
sole contributor, best as I can see), taking your time away from actually
producing software.
+1 from me
On 7/5/18 9:18 AM, Edward Capriolo wrote:
All,
It was a sizable effort moving everything Gossip into the incubator. Thank
you all for your help along the way. Recently activity has slowed down,
much of this falls on me.
My opinion is gossip would be much better off moving back to github and be
independently hosted (by me or someone else) I believe for the following
reasons:
Infrastructure:
AAA
I forgot my password and when I clicked the "FORGOT MY PASSWORD" link I
got
back a PGP email. No instructions in the email, lol city. I had to google
around ASFs site to try to figure out what to do. Try googling 'pgp lost
password' on apache's docs and figuring out what you need to do.
Releases:
The release process for most Java projects using maven 'mvn release:clean
&& mvn release:prepare && mvn release:perform". Hosting is free and sign
up
takes less then a day. Apache incubator wants to see releases as a sign of
health, yet the release process is involved. We have to do the maven
steps,
generate an email with the checksums of all critical files, post a vote on
the incubator list, release the artifacts to central, and copy them to an
svn directory.
That is a vote across 2 mailing lists. and all the maven steps, and other
manual steps, and that does not even count getting the website changed.
For
me what is a 5 minute thing turns into a days long process. The net result
is we have features in trunk not in the release because doing a release is
just a drag. No one is even half interested in taking on this process and
I
only did it because it is the only way.
Community:
Apache incubator is about building communities.
Mailing list
The mailing list is fairly opaque to me. I am sure there is some way to
figure out what the subscriber base is but I don't know it.
Jira
Jira is great tool but the implementation slows people down. New users
have
to sign up, and they are unable to assign themselves tickets until I
navigate into JIRA and add them to a group. With open source and
attracting
contributors it helps to be able to strike while the iron is hot. Having
users confused as to weather they can start on a task does not help with
that.
GIT
Apache has git but not github is only a mirror. When I have to merge
peoples stuff I have to do it by hand with git commands. (No squash and
merge button)
Updating the site:
Another series of obscure svn commands, making simple things hard, (much
like the release process)
Reports
I get an 4-5 emails at different rates titled "Incubator Report Due" at
different rates. Only one of them is for this project. We were never great
with reports. Almost all the info in the report could be automatically
generated. We missed a report, we got placed onto a report now do every
month category.
The last one was due yesterday, sorry I was enjoying a hotdog at a bbq, I
went to fill it out today and, saw yet another email chain on the
incubator
list about how Gossip should leave apache. The report is just another huge
time suck, the time I spend doing it I could be doing an hour of code
review.
Even though some things are in the incubator 7 years, and some apache TLPs
have no activity Gossip out of the incubator seems to be a constant thing
for some....
So lets get out of here.
