"Geir Magnusson Jr." wrote:
> A 'ToolForge' might be a nice 'project' under the mini-Jakarta - with
> the understanding that anything that gets real traction be made a
> project in it's own right?
Why not go the whole nine yards and develop a secure, back-end
administration tool for managing the nuts-and-bolts of Jakarta (like
SourceForge), that can also generate a friendly public interface for
product distribution (like CPAN).
It's possible that this could be mainly an implementation of existing
Jakarta technologies, like Alexandria, Jyve, WebDAV, and Avalon --
much like what was done with Jetspeed. It would also be interesting to
try and adopt the Jetspeed portlet into another product, since I
believe this was meant to be a standalone API.
With a proper tool, it would be much easier to allow Committers to
create experimental subprojects, whether they are meant as tools or
products. These could then be exposed to the public in stages
(internal-only (experimental), incubator, catalog, showcase) until they
hit the top-level showcase category (where all the products are today).
This would also make it easier to manage the "driftwood". If an
experimental or incubator project hasn't had a CVS update in six
months, it could be automatically archived and marked inactive. Of
course, once a project made it to the catalog, it would become a
permanent fixture.
The voting (aka peer review) would then not be about creating
subprojects, but whether to expose them to the public. This follows the
same Rules for Revolutionaries we adopted for CVS branches,
< http://www.x180.net/Mutterings/Apache/rules.html >
but expands it to include the infrastucture you need to make a
revolution work.
We might also be able to automate some of the management features, like
voting, the infamous Status file, the whoWeAre pages, to make these
easier to keep up-to-date, and to weave Meritocracy into the base
infrastructure.
It would then be a small step for another organization with a broader
scope to use the same product to launch a CJAN.
And, if the infrastructure is designed to encourage open source
development by Meritocracy, this would also serve the another goal of
the ASF -- to provide an alternative model to "development by Benevolent
Dictatorship".
< http://java.apache.org/main/constitution.html >
-Ted.
