On Mar 14, 2007, at 8:55 AM, William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
Justin Erenkrantz wrote:
To be a bit more concrete (names removed to protect the innocent - if
they wish to reveal their cloaks, they can), in httpd-land, a number
of developers raised the concern that a committer should no longer be
allowed to create a sandbox within the HTTP Server PMC because that's
now the charter of the Labs. The original committer was intending to
start on a new version of httpd and wanted to try out some ideas and
get feedback from [EMAIL PROTECTED] - but, these individuals mentioned that
they felt that such a proposal ought to be governed by the Labs PMC
*not* by the HTTP Server PMC. (I believe in the end, the sandbox was
created within the httpd PMC SVN space.)
To clarify, said anonymous committer was told a copy of the project,
modulo their changes was welcome in a sandbox.
Sorry, but it's not clarifying, Bill. Told by whom, told why, and why
does labs@ care? I also don't understand the "modulo"-ness.
The particular case they wanted was to mess with one source file not
in a project tree, to prove a concept, and the committer didn't even
expect the source code they planned to commit to necessarily work or
become part of the project, simply to illustrate that something could
be done.
All of which most seems to fall into the scope of a labs. experiment.
*shrug*. Maybe, maybe not. It sounds like an experiment with an
existing codebase, so I would think it would normally, you know, be
kept close to that codebase. Just because you can do something like
svn cp -m "Starting some-idea" https://.../trunk https://.../
branches/some-idea
svn cp ...-trunk ...-some-idea
cd ...-some-idea
svn switch https://.../branches/some-idea
vi some.file
vi some.other.file
svn ci -m "WDYT?" some.file some.other.file
which takes a lot less energy/bandwidth/discussion/etc than setting
up some separate project (that you first need to discuss with a
separate group of people), results (probably) in better peer review
due to the commit going to the right mailing list, etc etc etc.
Of course the HTTPD PMC can decide to disallow such things if they
want, but I certainly think that this kind of toying around can be
quite healthy and I'd support it if I was on the HTTPD PMC.
I don't think most committers are confused by the difference between
sandboxes and labs.
Yup -- Apache Labs is a specific project with a specifc charter and
specific rules that hosts specific things, whereas "sandbox" is a bit
of a vague term we use across the ASF to sort-of mean "you can play
around and mess with some things here".
And heck, if you want to sandbox an experiment and encounter
resistance
by your project, you SHOULD proceed to prove your experiment at the
labs and bring back the finished work to your peers.
Actually, you should then feel free to do a whole variety of things,
and bringing the experiment to the labs is only one of many things
you could consider. You could blog about it, start a project on SF or
google code, or decide to give up open source development alltogether
and go travel around the globe on foot.
I personally would probably proceed to try and prove my experiment by
writing a long e-mail or two, posting a patch to jira, or something,
and I would then stamp my virtual feet and be grumpled with my fellow
developers for not just seeing through my little experiment. I don't
think I would approach the labs project. Of course, that's all pretty
hypothetical, since I've never really worked on a project where any
of my experiments encountered a lot of resistance.
/LSD
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