On 31/05/2011 16:39, Simone Tripodi wrote:
(PRE: take the following strictly as my personal consideration)
Hi again guys,
following Christian questions, I think that giving more karma to Lab,
allowing releases, would benefit the whole Apache ecosystem. I mean:
apache-extras is AFAIK open also to non ASF committers, Lab is not.
That's the main difference.
There are sound legal reasons why releases are not allowed. In short
allowing releases means that the overhead on the PMC is vastly increased
and thus labs would not scale.
However, this thread is about labs not having momentum - scaling is not
a problem right now. Maybe we got the balance wrong.
There are many differences between extras and labs. Extras is supposed
to be a place to host real software with real users and non-ASF
developers. Labs is a place for experimentation either alone or with
fellow ASF committers without the overhead of running a real open source
project, such as having to manage write access, collect CLAs or do legal
due-diligence on releases.
Labs was not created as a hosting platform for full projects. Nor was it
created as a away to circumvent the processes that make ASF projects
valuable to users (i.e. they are legally sound).
I wonder if this thread is losing sight of what labs should be? I wonder
if there is an appetite for something that is not labs? Something that
can make releases, but still enhance visibility for ASF committers
(although with only 100 people ever having posted to this list I'm not
sure labs ever achieved that).
We can still continue follow the community/general consensus way,
since the Lab owner can propose an RC, then the PMC could vote for
success/failure. Users can reuse that components at their own risk,
since it is a lab component. Lab releases could be marked as
apache-foo-X.Y-lab (like we do for -incubating)
Approving a release is much more than just voting. If you ever vote +1
for a release without doing due diligence on it please stop doing that -
now. Doing so undermines the whole purpose of the ASF from the
perspective of our users. The vote for a release indicates that the
software can be released *legally* as an Apache Licensed product and
thus safely used.
Speaking entirely personally, I would resign from this PMC if that role
included an expectation to do due diligence on releases. I (and I would
guess) many others don't have the time for this on random experimental
projects that don't pique our personal interest.
The side effect could be an extreme proliferation of Labs :(
And the scaling problems that come with that....
The current rules were put in place for a reason. If we want to change
those rules then we need to figure out how to handle the possible results.
Ross
Do you think that would be an evaluable option?
Many thanks in advance, all the best!!!
Simo
http://people.apache.org/~simonetripodi/
http://www.99soft.org/
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Ross Gardler<[email protected]> wrote:
On 31/05/2011 16:13, Christian Grobmeier wrote:
I'm more than pleased to tell you my little story :) When I started my
Lab, I just joined the Cocoon PMC, I was a fresh Apache committer, and
didn't have many contacts here at ASF, so the only chance I had to
give Amber enough visibility and catch someone else's interest, to
build a community around it, was via Lab. And it worked because it
became an Incubator, without looking for initial developers, but they
asked me if I was interested on it.
Thanks for that insight. This is something that labs gives but not an
external hosting location. Not even apache-extras at this point.
So, it would be a shame to kill off labs if we didn't replace it with
this
in some way.
Please answer me two questions:
1) I would like to create a Struts2 plugin. It is probably just one or
two classes and if the Struts people like it, it will probably not
stay there for too long. Is this a case for the incubator?
This sounds like a case for the struts project. If they don't want it then
apache-extras.org is the right home for it (perhaps as a Struts PMC
sponsored struts-plugins project).
2) If the Struts people don't like it, it might happen that I create a
jar package of it and put it for download on my homepage. No Apache
naming in it, except the package names. Is it ok or not?
Well it's open source so you can do that, yes. But why would you?
If you want to make a release for people to use it then I imagine you would
want them to get the source and maybe even fix a bug. In which case you
can't do that in a lab. So again, apache-extras.org is the right home.
If the answer to 1) is yes, I was afraid before all the voting before
the lab creation.
If the answer to 2) is yes, then I like Labs much more then before.
Labs is a place for experimentation, not a place for developing software
that is intended to be used. Your use case sounds more like software for use
than an experiment.
Ross
Cheers
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