On Sat, 2005-03-19 at 10:11 +0000, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
> >> Noticed that the latest onjava.com email refers to us as Apache Commons.
> >
>
> From: "Simon Kitching" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > I would prefer Apache Jakarta Commons.
> >
> > This project is exclusively focused on java; it seems reasonable to
> > reflect this in the "branding". It's a shame we can't use "Apache Java
> > Commons" but I believe Sun would not allow that.
>
> I prefer Apache Commons. I don't believe there is a great amount of linkage
> between Jakarta and [EMAIL PROTECTED] anymore.
I don't understand. Jakarta contains only Java projects; there's a very
strong linkage between jakarta.apache.org and Java.
If you are talking about the *ancient* java.apache.org domain, I didn't
think it still existed, and I don't understand what relevant it has to
this issue.
>
> For the record, were someone to propose a Commons TLP and offer to be Chair
> I would probably now vote +1.
(1) language-dependence
Suppose we have a TLP called "commons", and someone then creates a
common perl or python or ... library. Do we then include that in
"commons" too, and have discussions about this module on the shared
commons email list?
It seems to me that a "commons" TLP would need to be an umbrella project
for multiple language-specific commons, eg commons-java, commons-c++,
commons-perl. I guess this would be possible, but in this case do we
really gain anything by the move?
(2) maintainer numbers and PMC membership
I've been rather concerned recently by the number of jakarta-commons
projects whose pool of active maintainers has shrunk to 1 or even zero.
This includes:
* digester (I'm the only one who does anything anymore)
* beanutils (see my recent post)
* daemon (a patch posting to the dev list re daemon
received no replies at all)
* betwixt (Robert Donkin is the only person who does any work on this
AFAIK, despite their being plenty to work on)
However it is some comfort to know that the pmc for the whole of jakarta
typically contains the major developers for the big jakarta projects,
which are users of many commons libs. So problems raised to the commons
pmc also gets through to the major *users* of commons projects, because
there is only one pmc. Those who *use* the libs therefore have both the
power and the responsibility for resolving the issue, which is how I
think things should be.
I presume that if commons becomes a TLP then a new PMC would be formed
for commons only. In that case, issues with specific commons projects
(such as lack of maintainers) may not produce as much enthusiasm to fix
them because the commons-pmc may not include representatives of the
major projects using the commons libs. And the major users of the libs
(eg tomcat) may not be members of [EMAIL PROTECTED] and therefore
not have the authority to fix things when they need/want to.
I hope that makes sense.
(3) benefits?
What are the benefits of going to a TLP?
* I guess we do then provide a home for non-java "commons" projects,
which don't have any home at the moment as far as I am aware.
* It might help people find apache's "common library" collection
easier. But then again, the Jakarta "brand name" is reasonably
well known now so we lost that.
* ???
Cheers,
Simon
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