On Nov 26, 2004, at 3:37 AM, Ceki G�lc� wrote:
Nicko,
Indeed, I am certain that all those involved appreciate your frankness. At this stage, in order to build a wider community, my advice to you would be actively seek ways in which to enlarge your committer base. On way to get there, is to grant committer status to those developers who show that they have got a clue. Note that I am not suggesting to get nonchalant about it, but only slightly less conservative. It boils down to keeping the clueless out and giving those who show promise a chance. Compare this with the HTTPD project which is reputed to grant comittership status only to those contributors who show consistent and real committment to the project, say for at least 6 months.
I'm up to my eyeballs with log4cxx right now, but I have submitted bug reports previously (over a year ago) to log4net and already have my Apache CLA in order.
Regarding to jira/bugzilla or not to jira/bugzilla question, I believe that the decision regarding such a technical matter is best left to the people actually doing the work. I am fairly confident that the Board would sustain this view, if it ever came to that.
Keep in mind that there must be a convenient way for contributors to submit patches. The log4net@ lists apparently strip attachments; not your fault but mine. Having contributors post their patches at SF does not come through very well. You should consider completing your migration away from SourceForge. The mailing lists should be closed down, for example by refusing new posts and new subscriptions. Remove all file releases at SF. (Even under incubation, you can distribute a "snapshot" release here at Apache.) Close down the bug tracking system, the CVS repository, etc. In short, there should be nothing left at http://sourceforge.net/projects/log4net/ except pointers to http://l.a.o/log4net/.
The generic Apache JIRA set up has an explicit choice whether attached files are being submitted to ASF or not, it avoids the potential uncertainty or ambiguity of submissions to the mailing list. For example, I had one user send me an email with a "submission" but his email had a standard corporate boilerplate signature saying that the content of the message was confidential and for the addressee only. Had to delete that message without looking at the patch.
I think it would be desirable for the existing SourceForge bug and feature request trackers to be imported into JIRA. They can exported as XML using http://sourceforge.net/export. I'd recommend exporting the SF bugs, zipping up the XML file and sending it off to jira at apache.org to see if they either can import the existing bug list or provide guidance on how to do it.
I'd also recommend trying to preserve the existing mailing list history somehow.
