Noel J. Bergman wrote:
While recent discussions can provide an opportunity to see where we are and what adjustments we need or want to make to our process, I was really just hoping this can lay some groundwork for our future discussions. (of course I'm going to completely contradict this based on another point you made below)Now, committers seem to be less receptive to code that does fit with thier idea of "project scope" and "direction" and/or has not been discussed to death on the dev list.The specific concern raised related to an 11th hour decision to fix a long-standing bug. If the same decision had been made a couple of months ago, when everyone was focused on fixing bugs, everyone would have cheered. I don't fault someone for being negative about last minute changes. No one who has ever released commercial software should be favorably disposed towards such changes. I, personally, am negatively predisposed to such changes as a general principle. But in this case, there are enough people waking up to the idea that a fix is in the offing, and asking for it. And given what appears to be the modular nature of the fix (no code changes, a few new classes, and a config.xml change), that it seems warranted to make (and test) the fix.
Well, the tomcat 3.x vs. 4.x was an unbelievably stressful issue, and turned off a lot of developers to the whole project (myself and several others I know). I think Sam's comment was meant to mean what happened was the best resolution of the situation, rather than saying that everything turned out great. I'm sure there are still plenty of hard feelings.That specific situation was raised as an example within the past month, and held up in quite the opposite light, including by one of the main participants: http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?[EMAIL PROTECTED] e.org&msgNo=16161
I think this is very important though because this forthcoming "v3" discussions could take James in many many directions, and I'd like to provide as many avenues open to the community.
With hindsight, I would agree... (IMHO) the 2.1 release was to get a stable release out there, and a branch could have done that very well. The people interested in building a more stable, documented, backwards compatible, release out there faster could focus their attention on that branch, and the dreamers and itchers could focus on HEAD. The discussion might have gotten loud and distracting, but I think that could have been managed.While it is important to retain design cohesion, it is at least as important to allow contributors to "scratch their itch"Agreed. Perhaps we could have pre-branched v3 so that people could continue to contribute code while version 2.1 was prepared for release, but the consensus was that we didn't want to split our focus. Perhaps that was naive, or perhaps something else was an issue.
Alright, this is something I would very much like to work out if/when we ever get James as a top-level project. The decision making for Jakarta is poorly worded IMHO. It would be great to just have a chart to say these are lazy/not lazy, these are consensus/majority, and these don't require votes.Lastly, let's consider votes and vetoes. Sam Ruby's comment was that "Vetoes are, as a general rule, anti-social behavior and are to be used sparingly. They are to be used to draw attention to stop-ship types of bugs and resolvable design disputes." I think that it is important to keep in mind that a vote and a veto are not the same. The -1 votes I recall were on procedural matters, not technical, and therefore not vetoes. An issue could be raised as to whether or not the file system bug was a stop-ship issue. In which case there would be two perfectly valid and incompatible points of view that would need to be reasonably resolved. One view being the concern over
And specifically to the file-pop3 bug, I'm pretty sure this qualifies as a "Showstopper" which requires lazy consensus, so Peter's -1 was a veto. I (and I think most people) treated it as a veto, as we did with other recent -1s. If some of them weren't and people were needlessly arguing against the -1s, then there is that much more of a need of voting process clarity.
How about this as a way to resolve it... whoever calls for a vote states whether this is a consensus (has vetos) or a majority vote? This adds clarity to the vote process so everyone doesn't have to individually classify the vote and determine whether they want to lobby against a -1 that gets cast. This puts the burden on the person calling for the vote rather than every potential voter.
We could enforce this in a manner similar to vetos... vetos without explanations can be ignored, and we could say calls for a vote can be ignored unless they state whether it is a consensus or majority vote (and ideally explain what category of vote this is).
I think that's a very good point. This gets somewhat beyond what I'm hoping to accomplish, which is probably nothing more than a common language and procedure.Since Serge wanted to raise the issue of how to structure and deal with technical disputes, I'll follow up by quoting myself from a message I posted to avalon-dev@: "Consider this: why must a justification must be given for a technical veto? Do you suppose that the purpose is simply to provide an excuse for the veto? I submit that it is about providing a basis for reaching a new consensus. Consensus isn't about one person being able to act as a roadblock. It is about focusing attention on critical issues on the belief that the community consensus will be the best solution available at that time."
Well, I've got a little too much Adam Smith and capitalistic theory in me to rely on a system that predicates that "everyone has James' best interest in mind" to work. ;) I think most everyone does wants James to do well, but we have different opinions about what that means or how to get there (in most ambitious sense, is James going to replace Sendmail, Exchange, or be something altogether new?). To me, the more we can harvest the energy from individual's with their self-serving goals, the better we (James) will fare. Anyway, that's just some personal philosophy.If someone doesn't have James' best interests in mind, that's one thing. But there is no question in my mind that everyone involved in the most recent argument not only has James' best interests genuinely at heart, but has selflessly demonstrated it by deeds.
Merry Christmas to everyone!
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Serge Knystautas
Loki Technologies
http://www.lokitech.com/
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