As I see it, the incubator as we have it is a mechanism for coping with the lack of mentor commitment. As Ross often writes, it's easy to say that Mentors *should* make this commitment, but mentors are volunteers, and things happen. Upayavira wonders if Mentor 'harvest glory' and then wander away. I think it's more likely that they do the best they can, given the constraints of their lives.
If three members showed up and were willing to state the necessary level of commitment to a new project to be a TLP, sure, let them be a TLP instantly. But if that's the standard for starting a new project at Apache, I predict that we'll start very few new projects. This leads me to a question back to Greg: what do you want to do if a new project has troubles: a Mentor has a kid, or a new job, or whatever? Shut it down? I'd suspect that you'd hope to recruit a replacement, but that's a messy procedure for the board to be stuck with. I end up thinking that this looks like a _reductio_ argument that leads back to the IPMC. How about the following more incremental experiment: we do what Upayavira says: we set a higher bar for mentors at podling start time. We ask them to make a public statement of commitment that for some period of time (six months) they commit to thinking of themselves _as a PMC_, not just as some sort of diffuse advisors or coaches. I expect that this will make it harder to start podlings, and I think that this constraint would reflect reality. Such a group could then graduate as soon as it picked up a few more PMC members and did a release. If we stick to this, maybe the IPMC will wither away, or just shrink to a smaller group. I think that this experiment comes before Greg's, as we should see if anyone will make this claim, and whether they live up to it, before we launch such a group into the exosphere of pure board supervision. Ultimately, this might mean that we retire the word 'mentor' and replace it with, well, 'PMC member'. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
