The last thing that you need is a bunch of smart committed people who
talk about doing stuff the "Apache way" but don't actually write code or
participate in supporting users.
If someone is writing code that works, faster than the rest of the team
can read it, you are in a great position. Get more code readers!
If someone is generating more ideas for improvement than the team can
evaluate, then add more marketing/analyst types to the committee.
Ron
On 25/07/2013 12:56 PM, Jason van Zyl wrote:
On Jul 25, 2013, at 12:03 PM, Stephen Connolly
<[email protected]> wrote:
As part of trying to kick this project back to life, we need to grow both
committers and the PMC.
You don't need either. You need people who do work. People who do work may
happen to be a committer or PMC member but you have it backward. You need a lot
of people who do a lot of work to drive a project forward.
One of the issues with growing either is determining if potential
candidates are the "right sort of person".
People who do work. I'm not sure how you decide the "right sort of person" if
it's not based in the actual contributions to the project. Not what might be contributed,
but what has actually been contributed.
There is a disagreement in the PMC as to whether "dedication to the Maven
project community" is relevant to such discussions.
Are not people who do work dedicated? Are not people who have done the most
work the most dedicated? To me doing work is the whole basis of a meritocracy,
doing work is table stakes for being on the PMC and is first condition at least
in a meritocracy.
For growing committers, this is usually a small issue, if at all.
For growing the PMC it can be quite contentious, especially when
considering "controversial" candidates.
Discussions should be about the work that is being done on the project.
Everything outside of that is not within the purview of the discussion. How can
it be? It's generally looking at the contributions over the last 6 months or a
year and making a decision based on the merit of that work.
In an effort to try and harmonise the PMC, I - as one of the fence sitters
- started this debate... In essence calling on that group that trumps the
PMC... ie the community.
John posted the proposed - remember we are CTR not RTC - addition to the
page I started, at least as a stalking horse (or perhaps it is his
opinion... I will leave it up to him to state his position)
On Thursday, 25 July 2013, Jason van Zyl wrote:
So what's outlined in those paragraphs have counter examples at the ASF. I
do not believe it is a bad thing to have alternative distributions or
forks, and it doesn't matter where they are. What you are saying is that
committers are obliged to share all their work with other committers. Which
is more coercion than a matter of choice. For all work that happens within
the bounds of the ASF absolutely. Core changes should not be made projects
without discussion. That's a good rule and helps with stability. For work
that happens outside the bounds of the ASF an author is obliged to do
nothing of the sort and the assert as much is absurd quite honestly. What
right does the ASF have over work that is not done at Apache?
In fact there are people on the ASF Board who belong to companies that
have long standing forks and/or alternative distributions of ASF projects.
Look at Hadoop: there are two companies that have people on PMCs who
maintain alternative distributions with code that does not exist in
standard distributions. Both Cloudera and HortonWorks maintain versions of
Hadoop that are not compatible and/or have different code than the version
from Apache. There is selective patching and additions made to try and
provide a better distribution of Hadoop. I don't think this is a bad thing.
This also happens with Cassandra and the people who work at Datastax where
an alternative distribution is made. I don't know as much about what is in
those distributions insofar as code that doesn't exist in the standard
Apache distribution. Again, I don't think this is a bad thing. I'm sure
they would all tell you that they are trying to make a better version of
said project, they work with customers, work at a different pace and hope
to integrate their work back in later if possible.
If this is a sideways attempt to address what I'm doing in Tesla, which is
what it appears like to me, then just start a discussion on the dev list.
Happy to discuss it.
It would be great if you could have that discussion on the dev list any
way... But what prompted me to prod John to commit the text and me to start
this discussion is a long running debate on the PMC private list as to what
kind of person should be on the PMC... By long running I mean that some
aspects of this are more than a year old and have been in mails since
before you started to re-engage with the project.
That does not mean that the stuff you are doing at Tesla is not relevant or
a trigger for trying to sort out the disconnect between two camps in the
PMC... More that it is being considered in a common context of an ongoing
debate, and in an effort to resolve the debate we are asking those we are
supposed to serve for their input.
HTH
But if someone posits that all work related to an Apache project has to be
done at Apache, then I will say that is a ridiculous supposition and you
can find ten counter examples in ten minutes if you went looking.
On Jul 25, 2013, at 10:31 AM, Stephen Connolly <
[email protected]> wrote:
On Thursday, 25 July 2013, Curtis Rueden wrote:
Hi Stephen and everyone,
I largely agree with Nigel, and would add that in general, bureaucratic
rules prohibiting various (often technically and/or socially sound)
actions
such as forking are a great way to ensure that skilled people distance
themselves from the organization (i.e., quit the PMC, decline to join,
etc.). You will be left with only bureaucrats who can tolerate those
restrictions, and worse, create even more of them.
Of course, there should be good, publicly stated reasons for
long-running
forks.
I will not speak for the author of the proposed revision, but my
understanding of the intent is that these forks should be hosted on ASF
hardware in public and as part of our community.
It's not about no forking, but allowing the committers to have an ongoing
view of things in the community.
Any committer is free to edit the wording if they want right now... The
doc
is a work in progress proposal
Merging to mainline is ideal but not always practical in the real
world. Developers need the freedom to experiment, even (perhaps
especially)
when in active community positions such as the PMC.
That said, it is certainly the responsibility of those on the PMC to
act as
community leaders via best practices. But enforcing that in writing, at
least as the current proposal does, seems very counterproductive to me.
Regards,
Curtis
On Jul 25, 2013 8:59 AM, "Nigel Magnay" <[email protected]> wrote:
That whole section I find pretty bizarre.
- Apache is about (open-source) software.
- Writing code is *good*.
- Forks are *good*
*
*
I'm put in mind of Linus' talk about why git distribution is so
important -
that 'if you don't think I'm doing a good job, then you can just take
your
code from another maintainer. *That's* what keeps a project honest and
responsive to the users.
I would have thought that the kinds of people who are interested in
writing
maven-esque code would be some of the people you'd want on a PMC. If
they
have a "long running fork" or a "reimplementation", surely they would
be
lobbying for its integration? Merging is also good. If, despite this,
they're choosing to do this elsewhere, and/or are having trouble
merging
projects in, isn't that a pretty sad indictment for the health of the
project? Isn't it a bit like saying "boo-hoo, those that are doing the
actual work might go work in their own sandpit if we won't play ball,
let's
ex-communicate them" ?
Unless (as some have suspected for a while) Apache isn't about software
anymore, it's about the continued existence of Apache (cfex:
OpenOffice).-
a political edifice where projects go to die. That's certainly what
those
added paragraphs say to me.
On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Stephen Connolly <
[email protected]> wrote:
There are two schools of thought amongst the current members of this
projects PMC.
Without wanting to deliberately tip my hand and reveal where my
opinion
is,
we would like to solicit the opinions if the community that we serve.
Please give us your thoughts.
The topic is essentially:
Do you want the members of the Maven PMC to be social leaders of the
Maven
community, who's actions demonstrate the best community beThanks,
Jason
----------------------------------------------------------
Jason van Zyl
Founder, Apache Maven
http://twitter.com/jvanzyl
---------------------------------------------------------
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in
moral philosophy; that is,
the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
--
Sent from my phone
Thanks,
Jason
----------------------------------------------------------
Jason van Zyl
Founder, Apache Maven
http://twitter.com/jvanzyl
---------------------------------------------------------
Simplex sigillum veri. (Simplicity is the seal of truth.)
--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: [email protected]
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102
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