Marshall Schor wrote:
Thilo Goetz wrote:
Here's what the Lucene folks say about their sandbox:
"Lucene project also contains a workspace, Lucene Sandbox, that is
open to all Lucene committers, as well as a few other developers. The
purpose of the Sandbox is to host various third party contributions,
and to serve as a place to try out new ideas and prepare them for
inclusion into the core Lucene distribution.
Users are free to experiment with the components developed in the
Sandbox, but Sandbox components will not necessarily be maintained,
particularly in their current state."
The Lucene sandbox is part of every Lucene release, it just comes with
this disclaimer. Since we've been modeling our sandbox on theirs,
this is what we're aiming for. I don't think we should add the
sandbox to the first release, but after that, why not. <snip>
I would rather have a place for things we agree should be part of the
release (let call that something other than Sandbox), and *also* have a
Sandbox.
Things going into the release would have to get some consensus that they
should be in the release, and then also pass any other
"release" requirements (if any).
Things in the sandbox would have a lower bar on consensus, etc.
An example: if there were two different, overlapping approaches to
something (a tool, an annotator, etc.) where one was clearly preferred
for whatever reasons by the current committers / (P)PMC, and the other
might have some questionable "clouds" hanging over it, still waiting
some kind of resolution, I would prefer to have these separate.
This allows us to take in things into the Sandbox and have them evolve
over time into things we feel good about releasing, which is a good
thing in my opinion :-)
-Marshall
I still don't quite understand what it is that you want. Correct me if
I'm wrong, but here's what I think you're saying.
* you don't want a Lucene style sandbox that's both low bar for entry
and goes in the distribution
* you want some place with a low bar for entry, and the stuff doesn't go
in the distribution
* once thing's from that other place (I'm not calling it a sandbox,
that's a term I reserve for the Lucene variety) are good enough, you
want to include them in the regular distribution, with no distinction
Did I get that right?
The Lucene model has the advantage that less sophisticated users can use
the stuff from the sandbox without having to compile it. That's what we
want, as people should try the things from the sandbox and give us
feedback. If we don't include that sandbox stuff in distributions, we
are encouraging a parallel universe where each tiny component has its
own build instructions, its own release cycle and whatnot. We're not
such a big development community that there is any danger of anything
totally wild coming in, not even through the sandbox. Again, look at
Lucene. They're much bigger than we are, and managing quite well. If
that kind of thing ever becomes a problem, we can still change the policy.
--Thilo
