On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Benson Margulies <bimargul...@gmail.com>wrote:
> TLPs do, sometimes, retire. Some of them have retired precisely > because all the contributors disappeared due to seismic events at > work. The board has been observed to keep a TLP alive really to the > last possible moment -- the point where there were less than three > people to vote on a release. > > This does not entirely reply to your point; how much viability should > the board want to see before establishing a TLP? I write, 'the board', > since a IPMC votes are _recommendations_ to the board. > This is a good question and I don't know if it can be answered. What is the minimal acceptable level of activity for an ASF project? I'm the chair of a project that just doesn't want to die: Tiles. Tiles has never had a huge amount of activity, especially when compared to Struts, which is the project that birthed us. There have been times where the activity has dwindled to near zero for the course of a few quarters. Then just when I'm about to write a board report saying the project is ready for the attic here comes some more work. If we had "retired early" Tiles 3 would not exist. We were very near closing up shop before a new contributor came along with some very interesting ideas. So the question remains: What difference does it make to the ASF if a project is very small or very slow? Maybe it is dormant for a year because it just does what it is supposed to do, or it has some bugs, but none of the users are so motivated to fix them that they actually offer patches, then it gets revived with some new ideas and work continues for a while. What's the motivation for closing down a project that slows considerably? Greg
