If labs could make releases, why would any committer want to go thru incubation?
Why does any incubated project want to exit incubation? They could just stay in the incubator. They do because the goal is to become a standard full-blown Apache project, with an independent mailing-list, web site and community. As for non endorsing: what does that mean? that we should just ignore
the act that releasing stuff out *is* going to be used, get into a maven repository and just exist on its own?
Not ignore, just inform on the fact that it's not a standard Apache release. I continue to think that if you feel the need to be able to do software
releases, what you need is an incubator podling, not a lab.
Will the incubator accept podlings with only a couple of committers, a few months of project lifespan and a 50 to 500 downloads? I don't believe so. At the same time, the bylaws require 2/3 of the PMC votes to change any
rule, so it's not completely out of the question, but looking around it seems that the PMC is aligned in thinking that labs should start out without releases and see what happens... because opening the door for releases now makes it *a lot* harder to shut it down later if it does turn out to be a potential overlap with the incubator. Put yourself in our shoes: labs is uncharted territory and we are responsible, to the board and to the rest of the foundation, to provide something that is *overall* valuable to the social ecosystem, not just more useful to you or me as individual committers. The two are not mutually exclusive, but not by-default aligned either.
I understand your point and agree that starting the lab should be done very carefully, much like it's being done now. I just wanted to voice my opinion that releases will become necessary for the health of lab projects. I'm just pleading for the lab to monitor that specific restriction closely and see if it really holds with time. My intention isn't to make the lab useful to me but I think that the reality of open source development and where its true creativity lies is in the space of projects started by a single developer or a couple of friends. The incubator doesn't really allow these projects to exist (don't get me wrong, I think it does a very good job for what it's been designed for) and I really hope the lab will. I'm just thinking of the projects themselves and their development here, which is going to be hard without releases. We do not know how this is going to evolve, or how much
positive/negative energy is going to end up creating. We have drafted strict guidelines because it's much easier (socially speaking) to relax strict rules, than to restrict relaxed rules. We'll move on from that, where possible, by taking small reversible steps and by adopting non-reversible steps with *great* care and *only* when there is enough experience learned on how the system will react to the change. As we are just starting and we have no knowledge on how the existing guidelines work, we'll just go on for a while before even considering re-evaluating them.
Point well taken. I'll stick around :) Matthieu --
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