There are views of the mentors which we need to weight heavily. There
are the views of the PPMC members actually doing the work -- me and the
5 other PPMC members doing the work -- which as far as I understand also
carry some weight, and then there are the views of other PPMC
non-involved members.
As far as I can see the forums can do everything that the ASF, the
mentors, the people doing the work and the broad consensus of PPMC
member seem to want.
We have one PPMC non-involved member ranting away on his own agenda, and
who refuses even to look at or to talk to the people running forums. As
there any reason under Apache rules why I shouldn't do anything other
than ignore this view as an aberrant outrider?
Rob, engage with the people. Understand what they do. Read what the
Mentors have said. And try to be constructive. Then perhaps I will
respond. In the meantime I will complete this work.
I would really prefer it if you would focus on telling the developers
how what there policies and guidelines should be for developing code,
which would be just as relevant here.
Regards Terry
On 05/09/11 14:33, Rob Weir wrote:
On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Daniel Shahaf<d...@daniel.shahaf.name> wrote:
Rob Weir wrote on Sun, Sep 04, 2011 at 13:01:50 -0400:
I think it would be good if they made up their mind soon. I thought
we were close to the physical migration being completed. If the
current volunteers are not on board with the Apache project, then
we'll need to explore alternative approaches, such as:
1) Point users to http://www.oooforum.org/
2) Do support via mailing list only
3) Use forums, but find new volunteers
4) Abort the migration, tell the forums guys to find some non-ASF
hosting where they can continue running the forums unchanged
And that would be fine as well. I think the general error in the way
we've handled this is we've ignored these issues for too long, plowing
through on the technical migration, while ignoring the policy issues,
or even the fundamental question of whether the forums volunteers want
to work with Apache.
Note of the issues I've raised are new. I've raised them all before,
months ago.
For example, I raised many of the project integration with the forum
admins back in June [1]. I raised the specific issue of the private
forums over a month ago [2], as well as branding [3]. One Apache
Member seemed to confirm that this was a problem at the time [3]. I
also received an off-line note from another thanking me for raising
these issues.
So none of this is really new. These issues have been known, but
sadly ignored, for months. Whenever these issues were raised, the
response has always been, "We'll deal with these issues later" or "I'm
only concerned with the migration of the servers". Well, later is
now.
Although some have portrayed my -1 as coming out of nowhere, this
opposition should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying
attention. If legitimate issues are raised and then ignored, then
that is what you will get if you try to just plow ahead.
If we had to do this all over again, I think the better approach would
have been:
1) Don't start with the server migration for the forums. Don't be so
presumptuous.
2) Invite the existing forum volunteers to make a proposal on ooo-dev,
for what they would like to do with the forums, if anything
3) The proposal should have been discussed and either lazy consensus
sought or if necessary a vote taken. Most likely the proposal would
have required changes to conform with Apache expectations.
4) Only after there is an acceptable proposal start the migration
The fundamental error we've made is to start the migration before
addressing objections related to process.
In fact we should probably pause on further migration until we resolve
these issues. I don't support the view that we'll defer this until
graduation. We might defer implementation until some later date,
certainly. But I need to see a proposal from the forum volunteers on
what they want to do. This needs to come from them, and be backed by
their consensus. If they are willing to fully integrate into the
Apache project, then that has my 100% support, even if implementing
this integration takes more time. But if they do not have that
consensus then I would not support the physical integration of the
forums in the uncertain hope that at some future date they *might*
wish to integrate into the project. The time to decide this question
is now. And it is their choice. The ball is in their court.
[1] http://markmail.org/message/jin4cg63sb6rp6xs
[2] http://markmail.org/message/qbusd2a4sbsfzciu
[3] http://markmail.org/thread/x2ezj4bwy2juorl3
