On Nov 19, 2009, at 1:53 PM, Benson Margulies wrote: > Folks, > > We have the MI cluster code to contribute. It has been suggested that > labs.apache.org might be a good target. However, topic-wise, Mahout would > make more sense. > > This poses two questions. 1) Does Mahout want the (small) distraction of > this at the moment? 2) Is the PMC willing to do something a little > out-of-the-ordinary with committer privs, as I'll explain below. > > to quote: "Apache Labs was established to provide a place where trusted > individuals can innovate without the burden of community building, with the > comfort of the apache infrastructure and remaining close to their peers, > making it easier to get feedback and seeding new potential incubator > podlings." > > I think that I can make a strong case for the author as being trustworthy at > labs. I'm reasonably sure that I can make a case for *myself*, at least, in > a pinch. On the other hand, I don't think it's viable to expect him to > become a committer at Mahout via the usual process, and I'm not comfortable > with contributing the code and not ending up with commit rights.
You know how the ASF works. Merit is earned. Many of us started out making contributions w/o said right, trusting that if we keep it up, we will be made committers. > And I'm > just not finding the time to lend enough assistance here to have much chance > of becoming a committer. > > So, I'm thinking that labs is the right path, but I wanted to give the > Mahout community a chance to think about it first. Labs is all about existing committers. There is no "convince labs to make [the author] a committer.", AIU how labs works. Please confirm on the labs mailing list. I also don't know if Labs handles "donations" of complete code. Of course, you probably could do it on labs, but that means you are the committer. The ASF doesn't like proxy committers, either. While I very much think this code is in line with Mahout and would love to see it here (I especially think it fits under the "Mahout as a TLP" model, which hopefully will happen sometime in '10), I think we need to know more about it. My suggestion would be for the author (from the sounds of it, it's not you) put up a patch that integrates it with Mahout (likely just the build system or tree structure) and demonstrates knowledge of how open source and the ASF work by seeing the patch through to committal by one of the existing committers. Doing so would also suggest that they can speak for themselves, which doesn't appear to be the case so far. Given reasonable proof of that, which should be pretty easy to do if the author is really serious about maintaining the code and being a part of Mahout, committership should follow shortly. In some cases, the PMC has voted to add people along with a donation (Sean and Taste for example, which was a major donation, including a Software Grant), but it is not something we necessarily do outright, otherwise everyone would be petitioning for it. In the case of Taste, it was already out in open source (SourceForge), had an established community which Sean had built and it was clear that Sean knew what being a part of an open source community meant. Hope this helps. I do think it would be useful to have in Mahout, but I'd like to hear more. -Grant
