Costin Manolache wrote:
>
> This whole "become a commiter" is not that easy
Tell me about it. Perhaps you remember when I first tried to get a few
patches applied to a subproject named Tomcat. ;-)
> My feeling is that the bariers between "normal" jakarta projects
> are too high.
Warning: I suspect that the following text will make a number of followers
of this mailing list a little queasy. You have been warned.
I am quite prepared to think outside the box here. In a matter of seconds,
I could update the avail file to make anybody who is a committer to one
project a committer to all. And as chairman, I probably could push this
through. That's how PHP development works. If you want a chuckle, take a
look at:
http://www.zend.com/zend/hof/sam.php
However, I'm more opportunistic. I have definite goals, and I set up the
conditions for success, but mostly what I do is lie in wait for the right
set of circumstances and then strike. I personally see versioning as a
major issue. There are many people unsure of the wisdom of treating the
set of code bases as a whole, and insist on only building their little
corner of the world against stable, released versions of everything else.
(Yes, Costin, this comment was directed at you <grin>). The only way I
know of to get people's attention is not with general theoretical issues,
but with real concrete versioning incompatibility issues. Once they are
see a few of these, they will be hooked.
But I digress. ;-)
The path to success here is to start small with a few trailblazers. Make
(or steal <grin>) some code that everybody sees value in. This will create
a pull. Use that to broach the discussion on the larger topic and request
a bilateral exchange of commit rights. Once you start swamping the people
with cvsroot authority with requests, the solution of merging all of the
lists will become obvious as the solution.
One last example. The soap web site on xml.apache.org is pathetic. After
enough complaints, I successfully lobbied to get all the committers to the
xml-soap project access to xml-site. (Unfortunately, that only stopped the
complaints ... ). Now if you take a look, every other project in xml
followed my lead and every committer to any project has update access to
the entire site.
It can be done.
- Sam Ruby
