reduction ad unum

[Stefano Mazzocchi]

My sarcasm hasn't helped some people on this list to understand what I believe are his mistakes. I'll drop it. I move to 'let me humbly suggest you' mode.

Avalon has a dual face: great technical ideas, very nervous community.

Some here imply that the first might be a consequence of the second. I disagree. Following darwinistic principles, if the mutation rate is too high, this leads to estinction.

Why is the community 'nervous'?

I think because it values technical excellence more than community stability.

This leads to continuous "I'll do my own way" approach. the ASF has experienced the amount of social energy required to deal with internal forks (see Tomcat 3.x vs Tomcat 4.x) in projects where this is not common practice.

Avalon seems to have internal forking methodology as a 'built-in' practice for dealing with social friction.

This is a potentially explosive situation if these concepts are injected into other communities. The ASF board acted as consequence.

- o -

Now, what can we do to solve this?

There is only one way: stop the 'route around consensus by forking' attitude that this project is based on.

Does this mean that we must throw away Phoenix and all the great work that people have done so far?

read my lips: N O !

Does it mean that the ASF wants to kick Peter out?

N O ! but he has to agree on the social practices that Apache values if he wants to be part (and legally protected!) by this foundation.

Does it mean that somebody from above (board, PMC, members) will impose a technical vision on this community? (such as a single ubercontainer)

No!

Does it mean that simply by saying so friction will go away?

No, I'm aware of this, but a number of people that have a proven record of appreciation around consensus-based development practices will help this community to polish its social practices but without imposition, just with suggestions, like I'm doing now.

Berin, Paul, others, no reason to freak out: from a technical point of view, the community will decide how things work and how things are going.

I just voted -1 on moving Phoenix out and I just proposed the community to think about the social value of *converging* toward a single layered container, instead of multiple ones.

And I acted as an invividual, with just my avalon committer hat on (a hat that I earned thru direct and explicit re-election, I remind you all)

So, my title 'reduction ad unum' doesn't have any technical concepts, but just social: let's go back in having *one* avalon development community, let's put all containers on the same level inside this community, and let's start convergence from there.

What does it mean technically? I don't really care, as long as it's the entire community and not single individuals that decide.

I like Berin's proposal of layered containers:

- reference implementation
- embeddable
- standalone

and I would love if they shared code directly rather than having different implementations of the same interfaces.

So, let's start from here: is anybody against this?

--
Stefano Mazzocchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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