Forking and going somewhere else certainly has the "grass is greener"
gleam to it.
The association with the much larger java Lucene community and the
expertise that community has (since the .NET community seems to be
mostly consumers of the tech, given the various comments about the
complexity of the code base), is a big boost for Lucene.NET. That's
both the name recognition and easy transfer of knowledge from one to
the other.
That said, the ASF is not a foundation that is a natural home for .NET
developers, which means that a lot of possible contributors are less
likely to see it as a project they feel qualified to contribute.
Aside the name issue, I think what makes NHibernate successful is that
it is maintained by a bunch of people who have deep involvement in the
problem being solved. This allows them to be a divergent fork. I don't
think Lucene.NET could pull that off. Unless Lucene.NET can attract
people who understand the inner workings of Lucene, staying at the ASF
with line-by-line porting is in the best interest of the health of the
project.
Arne Claassen
MindTouch
San Diego, CA
http://twitter.com/sdether
On Nov 2, 2010, at 11:20 AM, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
On Nov 2, 2010, at 1:53 PM, Granroth, Neal V. wrote:
Huh? What I should have been clear and concise to anyone who has
follow the project for the past several years.
Lucene.Net has already been through the official process of being
promoted out of incubator status. Why is it necessary to repeat
this process?
The PMC failed to respond to the list when problems with updating
the web site were discussed. So updating the web site is
insufficient.
There were also a number of issues with renaming the project to
remove "incubator" from the mailing lists and web site reverences.
We should not repeat or reverse this unless absolutely necessary.
A brief pause in development and list discussions should not cause
the PMC such worries about the vitality of the project.
You could write up a Board proposal to go straight to TLP status.
I'd have a hard time recommending to the Board that they pass it but
maybe they would b/c as I outlined in my original email, this
project isn't up to ASF community standards and not only that you
basically only have one current person who is an active committer/
PMC member. As I also outlined in earlier emails, the current
Lucene PMC is not the appropriate place for Lucene.NET b/c the
members of the PMC are not interested in .NET. George is the only
one and he has been gone for the past few months (if not more).
That isn't to pick on George, it's to point out that a project has
to be more than just one committer to be a part of the ASF,
especially one that has been around this long. So, in order for
this project to get more committers, people need to step up and
contribute. Therein lies the conundrum. The current PMC is not
equipped to judge those contributions since none of us use .NET.
Hence, going back to incubation gets you a new set of committers and
it gets you your own PMC where you can set the criteria for
committership (within ASF guidelines) and where the PMC is made up
of the stakeholders in the project. Being a part of a project is
about more than just the name, it's about the community of people
who use and contribute to that project. The .NET community is
distinct from the Lucene Java community, despite it being a port,
therefore they should be separate.
See http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html
As to those questions about forking somewhere else, that is
certainly something that can be done under a different name.
Lucene.NET is owned by the ASF. You can take the code and go call
it something else, no problem.
As to what the ASF brings, that's up to the community to decide.
The number one thing I think is our "community over code" approach.
Anyone can throw code up on Github/Google Code, etc. and call it
open source. If you are lucky, you might attract a following. If
the person who started that project is nice, they might even allow
other committers. At the end of the day, however, I think the ASF's
meritocracy is why I choose to put my open source efforts into the
ASF. It is just one way, not _the_ way. Having started other
projects here at the ASF (Mahout), I can tell you the ASF is one of
the few orgs. out there that can attract large bases of users/
contributors almost instantaneously. In other words, the ASF has
brand recognition like few other places. Again, this is just my
view. I'm not going to force it on you, but you are already here,
so it seems like it's less friction to go back to the incubator and
graduate to TLP than to fork and try to get people to go find you
under a different name.
My two cents,
Grant
