The PMC has to manage the team.
It is called a Project MANAGEMENT Committee for a reason.

You are right that the PMC can not order anyone to do anything.
Apache is based on volunteers working together as a team.
That does not mean that the Committee is powerless.
It has to work in a collaborative way to manage the project.
This means setting policy, setting priorities and assigning tasks or more accurately soliciting volunteers to do tasks that the PMC identifies as important. It means agreeing on dates by which tasks will be performed and taking action when it is clear that volunteers are not going to be able to finish work that they have agreed to do for whatever reason. This action may be soliciting additional help, revising dates to match reality or revising scope or a combination.

The PMC should make sure that the people fixing the bugs understand that the bugs need to be fixed in all supported versions if that is the Policy of the PMC. If they are not willing to follow the direction of the PMC, the the PMC needs to act.

The "merit" in meritocracy does not just mean code. It also means team commitment, collaboration skills and management. If someone does not want to work in a collaborative way and only does the parts of a task that appeals to them, they should be treated in the same way as someone who commits code that only fixes the interesting part of the bug and breaks other code or someone who doesn't want to use the framework and rewrites code to directly access data rather than using the framework. Some behaviour is not acceptable to the PMC regardless of how much time the volunteer is willing to put in.

How often does the PMC meet?
When was the last set of minutes published?
What is the most significant policy decision or other issue that the PMC is currently working on?
When was the last PMC meeting about the release roadmap?

Ron

On 21/09/2014 8:50 AM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
The PMC doesn't manage a team: we can't ask people to work on what we think is 
important.
The persons that contribute code to the project (and backport features) are 
persons like you and me, and the PMC doesn't have the authority or will to 
assign tasks to them.
In fact, I doubt I could ask you to test and backport to 12.04 all the 59 
features that the have been committed yesterday :-)

Regards,

Jacopo

On Sep 21, 2014, at 2:31 PM, Ron Wheeler <[email protected]> wrote:

No one has time to fix all of the bugs by themselves but by managing the team, 
it should be possible to get all of the required work done.

The PMC needs to develop a consensus about how bugs are handled in the official 
releases and then make lists of things that need doing.
If a bug is found and added to he JIRA, determining which releases it applies 
to should be part of the analysis.

If a patch is developed it should be possible to apply it to each release at 
the same time.


Ron


On 20/09/2014 12:47 PM, Adrian Crum wrote:
I don't have time to maintain 4 code bases (trunk + 3 branches). I will fix 
things in the trunk, and I will backport those fixes to the most recent branch. 
I have no interest in older branches. If someone else is using them, then they 
can create a patch for them. So, I have no issues with releasing old branches 
with missing fixes - because if anyone really cared about them they would work 
harder to maintain them.

Adrian Crum
Sandglass Software
www.sandglass-software.com

On 9/20/2014 5:29 PM, Jacques Le Roux wrote:
It seems a bit weird to me to officially release code with bugs when we
have already bug fixes in trunk

Jacques

Le 20/09/2014 17:17, Adrian Crum a écrit :
 From my perspective, anyone wanting to use older versions can backport
the changes themselves - either locally, or in the release branches by
providing a patch.

Adrian Crum
Sandglass Software
www.sandglass-software.com

On 9/20/2014 4:07 PM, Ashish Vijaywargiya wrote:
Hello Jacques,

Thanks for your kind words. We started this event considering the fact
to provide fixes for trunk and latest release branch which is 13.07. It
will be of great help if someone from community could pick and back port
the required changes to Release Branch 12.04. In future if we get time
we will also be taking care of back porting to R12.04.

We didn't back port changes in R11.04 just because it is very old branch
and very soon will not be maintained. Thanks.

--
Kind Regards
Ashish Vijaywargiya
HotWax Media - est. 1997
ApacheCon US 2014 Silver Sponsor
http://na.apachecon.com/sponsor/our-sponsors

On Saturday 20 September 2014 05:01 PM, Jacques Le Roux wrote:
Le 20/09/2014 13:28, Jacques Le Roux a écrit :
Hi,

It's great to see a second Bug Crush effort!

I have though a question, I see that you (HotWax Media team) only
backport bug fixes to the R13 branch.
I guess it's intended, so why?
I ask this because I already found myself trying to fix issues in R12
and R11 branches (I know will be soon no longer maintained R11 ) and
found they were already backported in R13
Jacques


--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: [email protected]
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102




--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: [email protected]
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102

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