Chris, Well put, +1.
Cheers, Chris On Sep 9, 2011, at 4:42 PM, Chris Douglas wrote: > On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Eli Collins <[email protected]> wrote: >> For completeness, Chris proposed a while back [1] that the RM is >> selected by majority PMC approval. He never proposed a vote to adopt >> these rules, but if we did, would they be invalid, ie according to >> other rules established at Apache? Ie does this project have the >> ability to establish it's own rules/norms w/o you telling us how our >> project works? >> >> 1. >> http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/hadoop-general/201005.mbox/%[email protected]%3E > > The intent was to evolve the policies we had at the time to an RM-like > role. As Tom raised in that thread, much of the intermediate phase is > unnecessary. In the project's current state, much of that proposal is > no longer coherent. > > For instance, electing an RM is an unnecessary formality. Further, > enforcing the version compatibility rules across the 0.20.2xx and > various 0.2x branches is prohibitively expensive. As demonstrated by > previous experience, making prohibitively expensive rules motivates > external forks, not coherence. They're useful guidelines for what the > PMC is likely to approve, but I expect we'll show more flexibility > than what that proposal outlined. > > In practice, we already exercise all the important elements of that > proposal. Someone creates a branch and intends to release from it, > others may help them, and if an artifact is produced then the PMC > votes on whether to release it. Any debate, accusation, and > recrimination concerning "investing" in a branch is pointless because > the "result" of the debate is irrelevant. Other than venting some > spleen, this thread has no functional consequence. > > On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Roy T. Fielding <[email protected]> wrote: >>> No RM has the final say on anything other than their own work. > > That's consistent with the position as forwarded. We're using "the > RM's branch" as a shorthand for "whatever the RM has elected to > include." Your comments highlight nuance, not fundamental dissonance. > >> I think there's a huge gap between the current understanding of the RM >> in our community and what you've outlined. > > It's vanishingly small, but important. Ownership of a branch isn't > vested in an RM, neither is it transferrable. If someone wanted to > commit something to a branch, they aren't required to ask the RM. Now, > it's *polite*, and I hope that most would give a heads-up for anything > they were unsure of, but the repository isn't a hierarchy of > dictatorships. The source tree is lock-free. -C ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chris Mattmann, Ph.D. Senior Computer Scientist NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246 Email: [email protected] WWW: http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
