On Tuesday, October 29, 2002, at 06:27 PM, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
David Crossley wrote:
Greg Stein wrote:
>Sorry, but nominations for membership, commit status, or PMC membership
>really should be private. I absolutely will not participate in such an
>environment, and will encourage others to avoid it also. These kinds of
>discussions really don't enhance the community.
Totally agree. Every community needs a place to discuss some limited things in private. Sure on cocoon-dev we discuss the actual vote for a new committer in public. However prior to that some sub-set of committers might discuss a proposed committer off-list. Sometimes we have said "no not yet, let us wait a while for such-and-such reason". This is a problem because only some of the committers are involved. So we do need a private forum where all project committers can discuss.
What about using CVS for this? Can only committers checkout the "committers" module? (I see that it is not available via ViewCVS.) If so then that makes it a semi-private place. Each project could have their own document (e.g. cocoon-new-committers.txt) where we discuss via editing the file.
This also helps to keep track of various developers that we may want to invite later. Too often i have seen people overlooked because we have just plain forgotten to invite them.
David,
what you are talking about is a PMC. If (when?) Cocoon will be upgraded to be a fully recognized and structured ASF project, we'll have a PMC exactly for those discussions and the PMC mail list (for legal and security reasons) will have to be private.
The ASF architecture is very well designed. Just it was not designed for containers like jakarta and xml. And this is why we are sometimes suffering or having to resort to our own stuff.
One additional point. It has been found that PMCs work very well when they are composed of as many project committers as possible - ideally all of them, but reserving opt-out for those who wish not to be there.
Chuck