On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 8:41 AM, Rob Weir <[email protected]> wrote: > Could you say a little about "subprojects" and how they work at > Apache? Are they the same as "components"? Do they have their own > PMCs and their own list of committers?
This is a controversial subject within the ASF. It is possible to partition code by subdirectories and manage authorization by these partitions. Some have done this in the past. Some still do. Others believe that committers can largely be trusted to stay within their area of expertise, and that it is always possible to revert inappropriate changes and deal with bad behavior. It is important that PMCs have oversight of all of the subprojects. The canonical anti-pattern that is often cited is when I was chair of Jakarta, which at the time was loosely "all things Java at the ASF excluding XML". This covered a lot of area and suffice it to say that the PMC did not exercise sufficient oversight over all of the areas. The solution was to spin off a number of top level projects... ant, tomcat, etc. Each has their own PMCs. Each is self-governing. That's the true goal here: establishing one or more self-governing projects. If you can demonstrate that a single project with subprojects is capable of self-governance, then this podling could graduate as a separate project. If, however, there really is little overlap between different efforts, then it is best structured as multiple projects. > -Rob - Sam Ruby
