Hi Todd, On Aug 29, 2012, at 2:18 PM, Todd Lipcon wrote:
> Have we not learned our lessons from the last attempts to split? > > The issues in our community, which I think Chris is referring to, do > not generally revolve around project boundaries. It's not the case > that the HDFS community wants to go one way and the MR/YARN community > wants to go another, and we get into a conflict around it. If it were, > then splitting into separate TLPs would make a ton of sense. You're right, it's not project boundaries, it's poor community behavior, and general umbrella-project-ness. One aspect I've seen is that exclusivity of allowing people to become PMC members on the project, and the separation of PMC from C. Other things I've seen are the use of technical justifications or complexity issues as an excuse for the exclusivity, as an excuse for drawing boundaries between project committers and PMC members, and then between specific products that the project and community as a whole releases, and finally other things I've seen include external interests influencing the way that business is done around here (need for releases in downstream companies, or projects driving upstream, Apache decisions, which are supposed to be independent of any lone company, or set of companies -- it's individuals here that do the work). The above is not a discrete thing that's happened once, or twice, or that happened three times, but was fixed later. It's never been fixed. > > Instead, the issues are usually _within_ a component. So, if we split > into 3 TLPs, then we'll just have 3 TLPs, each of which is just as > contentious as before. I doubt that. Creating TLPs either directly by going to the board, or via going to the Incubator should involve a set of members of the committee (PMC) that desire to work together; that ideally trust one another; that are inclusive to others who jump on the list and discuss things; and that collect these principles into the "Apache way", and build and deliver software at no cost to the public via this Foundation. Currently, the Apache Hadoop project isn't doing that. Something needs to be done to fix it. Just because an attempt to split the projects in the past didn't work doesn't mean that the Hadoop community should just accept "this is a popular project; it's going to be contentious; nothing to see here folks". It's more than that. > > Let's just embrace contention as a fact of life on a high-profile > high-stakes project and get back to work. -1 to that. Apache projects shouldn't be contentious, whether you are a billion dollar industry like Hadoop, or whether you are the US govt, or whether you are Joe Blow, Mom and Pop, building software to deliver to food truck vendors. It doesn't matter. Period. > > I wasted nearly a month undoing the mess of the last attempt, and I > don't see why this time it would go any better. -1 from my perspective > on splitting again at this point. Perhaps if we get to the point that > we're never making cross-project commits it makes sense, but we're not > there still. Again, technical issues cited for community problems. *there are not technical issues*. Cheers, Chris ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chris Mattmann, Ph.D. Senior Computer Scientist NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246 Email: chris.a.mattm...@nasa.gov WWW: http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
