Well, those are fair points. See below: On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Daniel Kulp <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun December 6 2009 7:11:13 pm Ethan Jewett wrote: > > Umm..... Why wouldn't they be committers? > > With my mentor hat on, this statement kind of concerns me. One of the goals > of the project in the incubator is to broaden the appeal of the product and > broaden the committer base. Statements like the above seem relatively > exclusive.
My take is that they wouldn't be committers because the vast majority of developers and users of a project will not be committers. As far as I can tell, Apache committer status is a pretty high bar. Let's take this client library as an example. I don't believe Daniel is a committer. Because of this, if the official version of the client is part of the Apache project, any patches he makes to the library will have to go through a committer. This is an extremely unproductive development strategy for the main author of a program :-) Unless there is some serious discipline imposed, it will probably mean that the version of the client in the Apache project will lag the most current version. > Why SHOULDN'T clients pertaining to ESME not be part of ESME. I would think > that interacting with ESME is pretty important. Getting client developers on > board with the project is probably a good thing. It can get more people using > ESME and thus new ideas and such. Truly, I think clients are separate programs and projects. I'm not sure how Apache deals with these. A quick survey of CouchDB and ActiveMQ (two Apache projects I'm familiar with and which have lots of clients) shows that most of their clients are not part of the Apache project, though some are. It seems this is an area of project governance we need to discuss, hopefully with guidance from the mentors about what the normal approach is for Apache projects. Thanks, Ethan
