Hi Clerezza team, I haven't had time to look at all the details, busy organizing an internal conference this week...but it looks like there were -1 vetoes on commits recently, so let me try to explain a bit better how that works.
If someone vetoes a commit with a valid technical justification, and espcially if another committer supports the veto, the commit MUST be reverted. Moving to a branch is a good idea in this case, so that people can see the code in question and evaluate it before eventually moving back to trunk. This is clearly explained at http://www.apache.org/foundation/voting.html : "for code-modification votes, +1 votes are in favour of the proposal, but -1 votes are vetos and kill the proposal dead until all vetoers withdraw their -1 votes." In this case, IIUC someone went ahead on some commits without asking for a vote, and that's probably where the misunderstanding is: any "important" change should be discussed on the dev list (not just in a JIRA issue) and applied only if people approve. The problem is in defining "important", but apparently those changes have an "important" effect so it's much better to have them in a branch, or as patches, before applying them to trunk. If it's hard to agree on what is "important" it might be useful to change to RTC mode (Review-Then-Commit) for critical parts of the codebase instead of CTR - maybe just temporarily until the release. See http://www.apache.org/foundation/glossary.html for RTC and CTR. thanks for listening, -Bertrand (with mentor hat on ;-)
