On Jan 2, 2009, at 7:49 AM, Antony Blakey wrote:
On 02/01/2009, at 11:07 PM, Chris Anderson wrote:
On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 4:16 AM, Geir Magnusson Jr. <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Jan 2, 2009, at 12:33 AM, Antony Blakey wrote:
It's never been clear to me that there is a process for voting -
the
decision making process within the commit group seems opaque.
How can that be? I assume that all decisions are made in public
on the dev@
mailing list.
The committers have a history of deferring to Damien (especially on
deeply technical matters like the document identity model). It's fair
to say that most of what we do is bug fixes and the like. When we
have
a new feature or module under development, we like to run the code by
Damien before we commit it. He understands CouchDB inside and out,
and
he's pretty good at seeing how an API detail or caching property will
effect the big picture of how people use CouchDB.
That would confirm my presumption that it's probably a waste of time
pushing something that Damien's firmly against, as opposed to
expecting to vote on it.
That would be the case of any committer - anyone can veto a code
change, including one by Damien (Technically it's a PMC member, but
some communities include all committers in this, which IMO is a good
way)
However, the fact that people defer to Damien is perfectly
reasonable. (But remember the goal of an ASF community - you want to
make it strong enough that the original founders/motivators can step
back)
There have been votes on the dev list before, but they are rare
because we so often move with consensus.
I'm merely curious bout this, but now that Couch is formally an
Apache project, is there some Apace mandated consensus-driven
decision making approach, or do they accept whatever model comes in
- I'm wondering if the ASF brand might 'mean' something in that
sense. And I've just noticed that Geir is on the ASF board - he
should know if anyone does!
I'm not here as anything but an interested user that knows something
about the ASF, and I see in a followup that you found something on the
website :) All is well.
geir
