My other message tied to this chain so not missed.

Ant had valid concerns for not having libcloud go TLP and I feel we need to 
discuss them along with a few other things that I feel are holding the project.

Lets start with the project participation. Yes, Ant is right in the fact that 
90% of all interaction is handled by Paul at the moment and I think this is 
something that should be discussed and a clear plan of action should be 
outlined. Most other OSS projects I work with you see things a set listing of 
project members and responsibilities along with a voting community of core 
developers working on the project for all actions and review of committed 
code/tagging.

I think this should be our first course of action, vote in the community for 
yearly rotating positions for things like overall project management, code 
management, documentation management, etc. This would probably clear up most of 
Ant's concerns in its self. (also defining set roles for the project that 
follow the Apache way would be good, ex: http://ant.apache.org/bylaws.html).

The second part of this should be a set meeting schedule that could be done in 
irc where we can get as many of the community using and developers working on 
the project together to discuss the motion of the project and goals for each 
release, Monthly 30 min to 1 hour irc meetings might be more then enough for 
this.


Outside of project participation, there is one other topic that I think need 
further discussion. This is the Java portion of libcloud which is clearly not 
ready for TLP status. I would move for this to be removed from the libcloud 
project for its own project.

In the past Paul has stated that libcloud is a reference spec with an example 
implementation in Python. I think this is far from the case as all of the 
specification comes from the current Python code base. At this time it is more 
beneficial for libcloud to be a Python cloud library and not a reference 
specification. Yes, this makes things a little hairy for things based on what 
libcloud does, but that is why they are based on libcloud and not part of 
libcloud which I think has been missed in hindsight with the java code.

I would now move that for future development and needs for graduation, we 
should discuss redefining libcloud as a python library only so we can more 
finely focus on a defined library api that can be adapted for other projects 
such as a java implementation to be based on.


Thank You,
Philip Schwartz
Software Engineering
LexisNexis RIAG
O - 561 999 4472
C - 954 290 4024

-----Original Message-----
From: Jed Smith [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2010 11:52 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [libcloud] Removal of the Java bindings

Good morning,

Monitoring ant's concerns with our incubator graduation, I'd like to start by 
addressing the first one. (This message is intended to address two,
actually: the Java port and, indirectly and subtly, committers not
participating.)

I somewhat agree with ant that we've been in a holding pattern with the Java 
bindings to libcloud.

Allow me to preface this message by reiterating that Eric's contribution is 
valued and really great. It's good to see that libcloud could become more than 
a specific language's bindings; it could become a contract for a developer to 
work with clouds, regardless of implementation language. I would like to see 
development on this front, and I have ideas on how to do so. The timing simply 
isn't right, until we can put thought into how best to handle this - it's more 
documentation instead of outright code. Such development would ultimately 
change the vision of libcloud from a Python library to a metalibrary, and I 
don't want to approach that lightly.

I move for the removal of the Java bindings from libcloud pending a plan for 
dealing with such alternate bindings. The development is welcome to continue 
outside of the umbrella of libcloud as it stands today; I believe a name change 
would be requisite, but I do not know the best way to handle that (Eric?). If 
Eric would like to take it in a different direction altogether once separated 
from us, I would actually encourage that as open source should never be 
restrained, it should be allowed to flourish.

Regardless of whether this severance is positive or not, I know that the 
libcloud community wishes Eric the best of luck. Based upon Eric's posts, I 
believe he will see that this is good for both of us, too - I certainly don't 
intend any ill will or malice or hard feelings! If Eric's Java port became a 
freestanding project of its own with its own community, I'd be pleased as 
punch. In the future, perhaps we can formulate a plan to reintegrate, and I 
know that we'd like that.

Thoughts?

/me pushes the ball down the hill

--
Jed Smith
[email protected]

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