Well said, it is more important to develop code than to worry about bureaucratic crap...
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeremy Boynes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 2:22 PM Subject: Geronimo PMC > The discussion on the process for nominating committers has highlighted > confusion about the role played by the PMC for a project and I believe > before we can make process on procedures for Geronimo this must be > clarified. This may be stepping into a political and social minefield, > but events over the last week have shown this is something that must be > resolved. > > There appear to be two different approaches within the ASF to the role > played by the PMC: > > Firstly, there is what, for want of a better name, can be called the > httpd approach. With this structure, the PMC has a relatively large > number of people comprising the active committers on the project. > Technical decisions are made by the committers on the public development > list, but procedural decisions (such as adding a new committer) are made > in private on the pmc list. > > Secondly, and again for lack of a better name, there is the Jakarta > approach. Here, the PMC is smaller and seems to deal mainly with > organizational issues such as adding projects, ensuring CLAs are filed > and co-ordination between sub-projects. Both technical and procedural > decisions are made in public on the sub-project development lists and > then passed to the Jakarta PMC where appropriate. > > I would speculate some of the confusion arises because many members of > the Geronimo community are new to Apache and, being Java centric, are > more used to the Jakarta approach, whereas the incubator PMC is more > used to the httpd approach. > > My first question is whether this is a fair and accurate summary? If I > am just confused, please just ignore the rest of this mail. > > The second one is whether the ASF as a whole has a formal preference for > one of these two approaches, or has prior experience shown one to be > "better" (with allowance that there probably as many opinions on that as > there are community members)? > > The third question is whether either of these is the "right" solution > for Geronimo, and if not, then we need to define an organization > structure that meets the legal and philosophical requirements of ASF and > the needs of the Geronimo community. > > The Jakarta sub-project concept seems to fit with the current status of > Geronimo - it is not yet a project in its own right, but a sub-project > of incubator. Given that, it seems to make sense to have the project > operate in a similar manner, where the committers make the technical and > procedural decisions and, where necessary or appropriate, pass the > results to the PMC to execute. > > However, we still need to debate and define the management structure > that will be put in place when Geronimo leaves the incubator. Either of > the two approaches may be appropriate, or we may need a different > variant capable of handling the legal requirements imposed by > certification. > > This discussion should start now but we cannot place Geronimo on hold > whilst it is resolved. There was very strong support in the vote on the > committer process to "do it a standard way", and the way chosen was that > of a Jakarta sub-project. Is it the right way, I think not - is it good > enough for now, I believe so. > > -- > Jeremy >
