On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 5:00 PM, Holger Hoffstätte <[email protected]> wrote: > Jools wrote: >> So many times I see "I've made a local change to allow..... blah blah >> blah", so why wasn't it easy to get that change into the code base in >> the first place ? > > Because the Apache committer model, combined with the chosen > patch-and-review process and the set of existing River committers, are > apparently not compatible with each other. I say this simply as an > observer of the results, without trying to imply too much. > > Since lenghty discussions at Apache (elsewhere) have made it clear that > the former is unlikely to change, that would leave the latter as, erm, > attack vector. > > Speaking as someone who used to successfully fix teams and dev processes, > I can assert say that the intended dynamics by the meritocratic model only > work under certain social circumstances. These do not seem to be met - in > other words, for whatever reasons the committers are either not committed > or committing. > > That being said, I agree that forking would be counterproductive at this > point, if only because many small incremental improvements can be fixed > without falling into second-system-syndrome and the "big rewrite/fix > everything" trap.
successful forking of apache licensed projects usually require a sufficient community and is much less common than with GPL'd code bases. external forks have to pay the price for the legal overhead associated with an AL'd project. internal forks have worked quite successfully in the past especially when codenames have been used. > I will not mention the consequences of a centralized scm very > intentionally. (: blaming the version control system is easy but misguilded the apache development model is canonical, which determines the choice of version control system. this choice of model is both philosophical and practical. the apache software license is not reciprical and so this means that contributions can only be accepted with oversight and due legal process. only one version of the code will be approved for release by the PMC as a canonically numbered version. - robert
