>From the "Apache Stratos (incubating) 4.0.0-M1 Plan" thread: "We are now preparing for the first milestone of the Apache Stratos (incubating) 4.0.0 release. The version of this milestone would be called 4.0.0-M1."
>From the "Apache Stratos (incubating) 4.0.0-M1 Status" thread: "We have now created an Amazon EC2 instance with all the latest binary packages of Load Balancer, Cloud Controller, Auto-Scaler and CEP Extension. A PHP cartridge was created using the new Cartridge Agent." I keep spotting this "we" in the emails, which makes me uncomfortable. Who is "we"? My impression is that this "we" refers to the WSO2 team, and that these actions are being planned away from the list. Is this accurate? If not, I would expect an email that asks the community if it feels we are ready to prepare a new milestone. I would expect there to be some discussion. But perhaps there is, and I have missed it? If there is no discussion taking place, and these decisions are being taken away from the mailing list, then this needs to change. The planning of features, new milestones, and releases needs to happen on the lists. And whenever you use the word "we", it should refer to a discussion that I can find in the public archives, where the there was some broad consensus that was reached. It might be unintuitive, but I would actually be more comfortable if these emails were worded "I am now preparing" because then it would be clear that an individual was taking an initiative and inviting the community to comment or object. It's subtle, but this sort of thing is absolutely crucial to graduation. And is the sort of thing that may be holding back potential contributors. We need to communicate clearly to everyone on dev@ that they are a part of our team and they we will include them in all of our planning, and that everyone has a voice. As for the milestones themselves, I think we need to make a few changes. Can we call them snapshots or nightlies? These are the standard terms and require less explanation. (I notice that we use the word snapshot in the filenames. So perhaps that's the one we go for.) This would involve putting them under a "snapshots" directory, and referring to them in our emails as snapshots. Actually not sure about what the standard policy is on hosting snapshots. I don't think putting them in our dev dist dir is a particularly good approach. This should only really be used for releases. The standard approach is for whoever is preparing the snapshots to upload them to a personal space on people.apache.org. Please consider switching to that approach, or else seeking clarification from infra. Whenever we make a link to these files we also need to make it very clear that these are not releases and that they are intended for developer testing only. Ideally, we only ever link to them via mails to dev@ and nowhere else. We should also be clear about what we expect from people. Do we want people to download them and test them? Do we have a test suite to run? A documented test procedure on the wiki? What sort of feedback do we want? Consider that testing snapshots and release candidates is a great way for beginners to start contributing to the project. You should see this as a recruitment opportunity. > Regarding the diversity of the contributions, we could see people like Luca > Martini and Alejandro Bonill have involved in above discussions. > > Anyway if you think we could do better in increasing the diversity of the > involvement, please add your thoughts. Directly engage with anyone who shows an interest in helping. With the code, docs, releases, test, packaging, wiki, whatever. Actively seek these people out and help them to contribute by providing pointers and removing obstacles. -- Noah Slater https://twitter.com/nslater
