On 24 Jun 2014, at 7:24, Roman Shaposhnik wrote:
On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 6:22 AM, Christian Grobmeier
<grobme...@gmail.com> wrote:
I think its not enough to just look at release / committer additions.
In the case of Wave, there was a committer addition in the past year.
Still
no commits, nor a release. Looking closer you would find that
committer was
added because there was some excitement around at that time, with a
lot of
plans.
But then people were facing simply too much work for a small team,
and
the motivation then stopped. A deadline wouldn't not help to get out
a
release.
That being said, I would like to re-suggest my initial thought with
one
modification:
- no new committer for a year
- AND no release for a year
- AND less than 20 emails in a month on dev@
- AND less than 10 commits/jira modifications in a month
- AND no way to change this in the next three months (in example:
hackathon
on horizon)
Here's my personal struggle with two of the items on this list:
- AND less than 20 emails in a month on dev@
- AND less than 10 commits/jira modifications in a month
I can't fathom how a community that is that active can't put
itself to a task of making a release.
Let's assume the Wave project would have more activity. Maybe lets say
they are operating with around 20 commits a month. It would be still
difficult to release the code base within one year, because its really
complex and
needs a full refactoring. If we do not weight activity in general in, we
reduce
the exit criteria to: how fast can you do a release?
And: if you don't manage to make a release in the first year - no matter
how your
product looks like - you might be thrown out.
At the ends of the day, the release of an incubating project
is NOT a glorious exercise in putting the final coat of paint
on a flawless product. It is rather a very mundane way sharing
technology with its users community. And after all, growing the
user community is as important as growing the contributing
community. It is only fair that IPMC gently reminds PPMC of that.
I agree, but sometimes it's simply not possible to release.
Actually, Wave *could* have released something, but nobody wants
it to look like that.
Let's assume they would release it now, which would be possible in
theory.
Let's say they would get 3 +1 from the PMC, which will be hard already.
Then you have a released project, but the community is almost inactive.
Heck, our TLPs practice it (where expectations are arguably
higher) let alone Incubating projects. Take Hadoop as an
example -- in order to make Hadoop 2.x successful the
community decided to put an early alpha releases of
Hadoop 2.0.x out to share the technology with its users.
It was exactly the right decisions and ultimately it resulted
in a much smoother 2.x.y series.
As to my knowledge, some Hadoop-devs get financial support from
companies.
Projects like Ripple, Wave or Log4cxx do not have that financial
support.
In most cases, people work on these codebases in their prime time.
For that reason I don't want to compare company-backed projects with
prime-time projects.
In short -- you don't have to make your releases GA. Alpha
releases are just fine. Still you have to demonstrate that
you are capable of sharing your work with the user
community and doing an alpha/beta/gamma/YNH release
is the only way to do it.
I know what you mean, but I doubt this alone is a factor we should
weight for an exit.
People might struggle with a release but be healthy otherwise.
People might get a release done, but have no community otherwise.
That said, reminding people of the "release often and early" thing is
good to do,
but also have in mind that incubator releases are very difficult to
make.
Regards,
Christian
Thanks,
Roman.
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