On Nov 19, 2009, at 7:49 PM, Benson Margulies wrote: > Grant, > > As someone who was given committer status on a project in a nonstandard way, > I have, perhaps, more flexible morals about the principles than you do.
I said we could evaluate it, but so far I'm not really for it, as much as I think the code would be useful to have as a part of Mahout, since it seems the author of the code cannot speak on their own behalf, which, as Ted points out, usually bodes ill for the sustainability of the project. > But > I certainly have no intent to try to convince you that Mahout should deviate > from normal community procedures if you are not so inclined. > > This is a high-speed implementation of > http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J92/J92-4003.pdf. Both Brown and Mercer are on > the author list. > > Yes, the author is not I. He works with me. > > It may be that the best solution here is for me to park it at the labs using > my status, and act as Jethran's agent. The ASF really frowns on proxy commits. I've seen people have creds revoked over such a thing, so I would encourage you not to go that route. I don't understand why Jethran can't just put up the patch himself so that we can have a look at it and evaluate whether it fits here or not. It's hard for me to imagine a project being successful where the main author doesn't have commit rights. If you're saying you have time for the commits and that Jethren has time to do the work, then you and Jethren would certainly have time to put up three or so quality patches to Mahout (you've already done a few and we know you get how the ASF works, since you are a Member and a committer, so it would not be a hard sell to the PMC). Given Mahout is pretty young, it really does not take long to get committer status. I frankly don't see why it is a big deal to go the normal route. > That would be a lot less work than > teeing it up here, and I think that lazyness will win the day here. Understood. I'd probably just start a Google Code project in this case, if it were me. I really do think it will fit under Mahout as TLP at some point, so maybe the we can come back to this discussion at that point.
