Re: Way to unsubscribe from mailing lists

[Mark Thomas]

On 25/04/17 16:11, Michael Shuler wrote:
> Many lists include a footer that have unsub info - does ezmlm support
> footer append? I wouldn't mind it, if it helps users, and it seems
> simpler than trying to filter random messages.

Yes it does. And the default footer includes unsubscribe info.

Mark

Re: Review of Cassandra actions

[Mark Thomas]

On 07/11/2016 10:52, Benedict Elliott Smith wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> 
> Thanks, that was a calm and diplomatic email.
> 
> recognise where they might need to apologise
> 
> 
> I will start the ball rolling here, as I have not always been generous in
> my interpretations of others' actions, and have certainly contributed to
> escalation.
> 
> But I wonder if you would also help get the ball rolling; your reasonable
> tone gives me hope that you can.  The topic for me has been: can board
> members recognise publicly where they have misstepped.  Doing so provides
> assurances to the whole ASF community that the board can be trusted.
> 
> https://www.mail-archive.com/user@cassandra.apache.org/msg48692.html
> 
> In this email chain not long ago, you attempted to apply a misreading of
> the ASF guidelines to non-ASF individuals.  When I pointed this out, you
> went silent.  In that chain, as now, I had a righteous indignation that no
> doubt inflamed the topic, and could have resolved the issue with more
> diplomacy.  I'm also sure you had excellent intentions.
> 
> Nevertheless, you did misstep as a board member by quite badly misapplying
> the guidelines.  With no public recognition of this, I was left with an
> impression of unaccountability; I don't know how others responded.

Benedict,

First of all, let me explain why I didn't respond. That particular
sub-thread had all the indications that it was heading towards the same
sort of heated, unproductive, negative discussion that has been observed
recently on this list. I wanted to avoid that. It is possible that the
tone could have been turned around with the right e-mail but writing
those e-mails takes time that I didn't have. I therefore took the option
to simply ignore your email. It might not have been the perfect choice
but it did mean that the heated discussion was avoided and I had more
time for other ASF things, both inside Apache Cassandra and outside.

Clearly you are unhappy about how you view my actions in that thread. I
believe that that is primarily due to a misunderstanding. Let me try and
correct that by providing more explanation and context. I could have,
and with hindsight should have, provided that explanation and context at
the time. Had I done so, I think the misunderstanding could have been
avoided. Consider that a lesson learned.

One of the topics at the August board meeting was the continuing
concerns that had been raised with the board (from various sources both
within the project and externally) regarding Apache Cassandra. There was
a generally productive discussion between the board and the PMC members
who attended the meeting and one of the points made by the PMC was that,
while they agreed that there were issues, they were unsure what they
could/should be doing to address them. The PMC asked if the board could
provide a set of concrete actions it expected from the PMC. As a board
member who had not been directly involved in Cassandra to that point, I
volunteered to review the various threads discussing the concerns, put
together the list of actions and provide the Cassandra PMC with a point
of contact if they had any questions or concerns as they worked through
those actions. I provided the list to the PMC towards the end of August.

Around the same time I subscribed to all of the Apache Cassandra mailing
lists. This was primarily to monitor the PMC's progress with their actions.

One of the things I quickly noticed was that many users required
additional resources (reference docs, how to guides, components, tools)
over and above that provided directly by the project. While
individually, none of these resources gave cause for concern,
collectively, I was left with a perception of the project not being as
firmly rooted at the ASF as it could/should be.

Getting to the thread in question, it resonated with the perception I
had of the project not being firmly rooted at the ASF. A user was being
directed to 3rd party docs rather than the official Apache Cassandra
docs and it appeared that the official docs were better (more up to date
/ complete).

I did not intend to suggest Ryan was trying to do anything but help a
user. My intention was to try and understand why/how it had happened
with a view to improving things going forward. If I left Ryan in
particular or anyone else with the impression that I thought Ryan was
somehow at fault, I apologise. I did not then, and do not now, think
Ryan did anything wrong.

Ryan's explanation made perfect sense. I still think it is worth the
project looking at whether there is any SEO tuning that can be done to
improve the search ranking of cassandra.a.o for "CQL" (and any other
terms relevant to the project). I say this because other Apache projects
I have been involved have been able to improve their search ranking with
various web-site tweaks. I don't know enough about SEO to know if those
tweaks would help Cassandra.

I would have pursued this more at the time but I read the second
paragraph of 

Re: Review of Cassandra actions

[Mark Thomas]

For the sake of clarity I am a member of the ASF board but I am not
speaking on behalf of the board in this email.

On 06/11/2016 01:25, Jeff Jirsa wrote:
> I hope the other 7 members of the board take note of this response,
> and other similar reactions on dev@ today.

I can't speak for all seven other board members but I can say that I am
monitoring this thread and the related threads (although I haven't
looked at Twitter where a lot of this seems to have originated). It is
apparent to me that a number of the other directors are monitoring these
threads too.

> When Datastax violated trademark, they acknowledged it and worked to
> correct it. To their credit, they tried to do the right thing.
> When the PMC failed to enforce problems, we acknowledged it and worked
> to correct it. We aren't perfect, but we're trying.

I think you are being a little hard on the PMC there. There was scope
for both parties to do better in a number of areas.

I do agree that things in the PMC have improved and are heading in the
right direction (with some more work still to do), as I hope I made
clear in the summary section of the review e-mail I wrote (privately) to
the PMC a few weeks ago.

> When a few members the board openly violate the code of conduct, being
> condescending and disrespectful under the auspices of "enforcing the
> rules" and "protecting the community", they're breaking the rules,
> damaging the community, and nobody seems willing to acknowledge it or
> work to correct it. It's not isolated, I'll link examples if it's
> useful.

I take it you mean "nobody on the board seems willing...". Again, I
can't speak for the other board members but let me try and explain my
own thinking.

A number of posts from a variety of authors on this topic in recent days
have fallen short of the standard expected on an Apache list. Trying to
correct that without causing the situation to escalate is hard. The last
thing I want to do is add fuel to the fire. I've started to draft a
couple of emails at various points over the weekend only to find by the
time I'm happy(ish) with the draft, the thread has moved on and I need
to start again.

Alongside this I had hoped that things would have slowed down enough
over the weekend to give everyone time to reflect, recognise where they
might need to apologise and aim to start this coming week on a more
positive footing. There have been signs of this which I take to be
encouraging. Moving forward I'd encourage everyone to pause and review
what they have just written with the Code of Conduct in mind before
pressing send.

> In a time when we're all trying to do the right thing to protect the
> project and the community, it's unfortunate that high ranking, long
> time members within the ASF actively work to undermine trust and
> community while flaunting the code of conduct, which requires
> friendliness, empathy, and professionalism, and the rest of the board
> is silent on the matter.

Your calm responses and efforts to inform the community are appreciated.
It is not an easy task and kudos to you for taking it on.

As as been said several times in recent days, board members are rarely
speaking on behalf of the board (i.e. representing the agreed position
of the board). It is unusual enough that when we do we'll make it
explicit. One of the reasons for that is that getting 9 volunteers with
day jobs in widely distributed timezones to reach an agreed position on
anything takes time. Based on what I have seen so far, I am expecting
there to be a response from the board to this series of threads but I'm
not expecting to be especially quick.

Mark

Re: Moderation

[Mark Thomas]

On 04/11/2016 15:47, Chris Mattmann wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> Kelly Sommers sent a message to dev@cassandra and I'm trying to figure out if 
> it's in moderation.
> 
> Can the moderators speak up?

Using my infra karma, I checked the mail server. That message is waiting
for moderator approval. It has been in moderation for 12 hours which
doesn't strike me as at all excessive.

Mark

Re: #cassandra-dev IRC logging

[Mark Thomas]

On 26/08/2016 19:17, Jason Brown wrote:
> +1. How/where will this run? Is there any apache infra that we can make use
> of?

Don't know. Checking...

Mark


> 
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 10:48 AM, Jake Luciani  wrote:
> 
>> +1 so long as it filters out the join/leave stuff :)
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 1:42 PM, Jeff Jirsa 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> There exists a #cassandra-dev IRC channel that’s historically been used
>> by
>>> developers discussing the project – while it’s public, it’s not archived,
>>> and it’s not a mailing list. The ASF encourages all discussion to be
>>> archived, and ideally, archived on a public mailing list.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Jake suggested, and I want to propose on the list, that we copy a log of
>>> that channel (minus join/part activity) to dev@ either daily or weekly.
>>> We’ll need to make sure we comply with Freenode’s IRC logging policy, but
>>> the project / developers receives the best of both worlds – fast, real
>> time
>>> chat but also public archives/visibility for people who aren’t online at
>> a
>>> given moment. The volume may be a bit higher than most of us have come
>>> expect from the list, but it brings the project closer to doing things in
>>> The Apache Way, and we can give it an easily-filtered subject for folks
>> who
>>> don’t want that noise.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> http://twitter.com/tjake
>>
> 

Re: Github pull requests

[Mark Thomas]

On 26/08/2016 17:11, Aleksey Yeschenko wrote:
> Mark, I, for one, will be happy with the level of GitHub integration that 
> Spark has, formal or otherwise.

If Cassandra doesn't already have it, that should be a simple request to
infra.

> As it stands right now, none of the committers/PMC members have any control 
> over Cassandra Github mirror.
> 
> Which, among other things, means that we cannot even close the erroneously 
> opened PRs ourselves,
> they just accumulate unless the PR authors is kind enough to close them. 
> That’s really frustrating.

No PMC currently has the ability to directly close PRs on GitHub. This
is one of the things on the infra TODO list that is being looked at. You
can close them via a commit comment that the ASF GitHub tooling picks up.

Mark


> 
> -- 
> AY
> 
> On 26 August 2016 at 17:07:29, Mark Thomas (ma...@apache.org) wrote:
> 
> On 26/08/2016 16:33, Jonathan Ellis wrote:  
>> Hi all,  
>>  
>> Historically we've insisted that people go through the process of creating  
>> a Jira issue and attaching a patch or linking a branch to demonstrate  
>> intent-to-contribute and to make sure we have a unified record of changes  
>> in Jira.  
>>  
>> But I understand that other Apache projects are now recognizing a github  
>> pull request as intent-to-contribute [1] and some are even making github  
>> the official repo, with an Apache mirror, rather than the other way  
>> around. (Maybe this is required to accept pull requests, I am not sure.)  
>>  
>> Should we revisit our policy here?  
> 
> At the moment, the ASF Git repo is always the master, with GitHub as a  
> mirror. That allows push requests to be made via GitHub.  
> 
> Infra is exploring options for giving PMCs greater control over GitHub  
> config (including allowing GitHub to be the master with a golden copy  
> held at the ASF) but that is a work in progress.  
> 
> As far as intent to contribute goes, there does appear to be a trend  
> that the newer a project is to the ASF, the more formal the project  
> makes process around recording intent to contribute. (The same can be  
> said for other processes as well like Jira config.)  
> 
> It is worth noting that all the ASF requires is that there is an intent  
> to contribute. Anything that can be reasonably read that way is fine.  
> Many PMCs happily accept patches sent to the dev list (although they may  
> ask them to be attached to issues more so they don't get forgotten than  
> anything else). Pull requests are certainly acceptable.  
> 
> My personal recommendation is don't put more formal process in place  
> than you actually need. Social controls are a lot more flexible than  
> technical ones and generally have a much lower overhead.  
> 
> Mark  
> 
>>  
>> [1] e.g. https://github.com/apache/spark/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed  
> 
> 

Re: Github pull requests

[Mark Thomas]

On 26/08/2016 16:33, Jonathan Ellis wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Historically we've insisted that people go through the process of creating
> a Jira issue and attaching a patch or linking a branch to demonstrate
> intent-to-contribute and to make sure we have a unified record of changes
> in Jira.
> 
> But I understand that other Apache projects are now recognizing a github
> pull request as intent-to-contribute [1] and some are even making github
> the official repo, with an Apache mirror, rather than the other way
> around.  (Maybe this is required to accept pull requests, I am not sure.)
> 
> Should we revisit our policy here?

At the moment, the ASF Git repo is always the master, with GitHub as a
mirror. That allows push requests to be made via GitHub.

Infra is exploring options for giving PMCs greater control over GitHub
config (including allowing GitHub to be the master with a golden copy
held at the ASF) but that is a work in progress.

As far as intent to contribute goes, there does appear to be a trend
that the newer a project is to the ASF, the more formal the project
makes process around recording intent to contribute. (The same can be
said for other processes as well like Jira config.)

It is worth noting that all the ASF requires is that there is an intent
to contribute. Anything that can be reasonably read that way is fine.
Many PMCs happily accept patches sent to the dev list (although they may
ask them to be attached to issues more so they don't get forgotten than
anything else). Pull requests are certainly acceptable.

My personal recommendation is don't put more formal process in place
than you actually need. Social controls are a lot more flexible than
technical ones and generally have a much lower overhead.

Mark

> 
> [1] e.g. https://github.com/apache/spark/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed

Re: 3.8/3.9 releases/branch freeze, current merge order

[Mark Thomas]

On 24/08/2016 20:26, Aleksey Yeschenko wrote:
> No. Removing a dead branch is just mindless admin work.
> 
> As for 3.8/3.9 plans, look up the previous quite lengthy vote discussion on 
> 3.8, on dev.

Thanks. Found it. Just need to go back a little further in the archive.

Mark

> 
> -- 
> AY
> 
> On 24 August 2016 at 20:23:04, Mark Thomas (ma...@apache.org) wrote:
> 
> On 24/08/2016 16:44, Aleksey Yeschenko wrote:  
> 
>   
> 
>> Also, cassandra-3.8 branch was removed from the repo, to further minimise 
>> confusion.  
> 
> That is the sort of thing I'd expect to see discussed on the dev list  
> first. Where is that discussion?  
> 
> Mark  
> 
> 
> 

Re: 3.8/3.9 releases/branch freeze, current merge order

[Mark Thomas]

On 24/08/2016 16:44, Aleksey Yeschenko wrote:



> Also, cassandra-3.8 branch was removed from the repo, to further minimise 
> confusion.

That is the sort of thing I'd expect to see discussed on the dev list
first. Where is that discussion?

Mark