> Sam's other recent "steering" comments are here:
LOL! Pretty accurate, though. I very much want this project to get off
the ground though volunteer efforts, not by a PMC mandate.
A general comment: some of the "discussions" here are over distinctions
that will have essentially no operational or observable meaning. For
example, what does it mean to have someone listed as a committer who
doesn't participate? Conversely, under what circumstances do we see
someone interested in contributing and with a prior history with other
Jakarta projects not being accepted? I have seen little evidence that this
is a problem.
There are a number of things that can't be mandated. For example, version
to version compatibility is one of them. However, we can choose to inform
people of the impact of changes, that's why I have been working on Gump.
Overall, I believe that people will choose to participate - or not - based
on the quality of the code in the components, not based on how sound the
"constitution" for this subproject is. And if time proves that the bylaws
need to be tweaked, they will be.
Finally, it is my hope that the end result of this effort is that the walls
between projects that people see as much harder barriers than they really
are will become more porous, with both people and code flowing more freely
between them. Much talk has been given to people getting commit rights to
this subproject based on their contributions to another subproject, but the
converse also needs to be true. If someone is working on a XML mapper used
by multiple subprojects, perhaps it might make sense for that person to
maintain the project specific wrappers for this function contained in each.
The project lead for Rhino is a committer to BSF and maintains his own
wrapper.
- Sam Ruby
P.S. I do try to read each of the e-mails sent to this newsgroup.
Generally, each time I read one, I find myself agreeing with the point that
person is trying to make - even when the participants clearly feel that
they are disagreeing with each other.
