Thanks Jonathan. I’m starting to get a clearer idea of what’s going on here. Do you think it was a walled garden in terms of making reviews for incoming driver patches when you did have them in the tree? What you are talking about in the first paragraph is precisely the reason that your community expands and that you create new PMC members and committers as they contribute things. You inevitably as a community will run into that situation and in those cases it’s time to make the new people PMC members and committers especially if you didn’t have the expertise in the code they are contributing to start with.
Furthermore, it sounds like you are saying for Java and Python these weren’t “fly by” contributions and more work has gone on in those drivers than e.g., compared to Clojure, C++, etc. Thoughts? Cheers, Chris On 6/4/16, 5:38 AM, "Jonathan Ellis" <jbel...@gmail.com> wrote: >FWIW, in very very ancient history we actually had the drivers in tree. It >sucked, because the people who wanted to contribute to the drivers were for >the most part not Committers, and the committers for the most part weren't >interested in reviewing drivers patches, and you have different, >non-overlapping sets of contributors for each driver. (A C++ driver author >generally isn't very interested in clojure and vice versa.) > >Two things really convinced us they didn't belong in tree, even if we >wanted to live with the above drawbacks: > >- If it's in tree, then the Apache committers are viewed as responsible for >maintaining it. Never mind if the Perl driver was (hypothetically) >contributed by some guy who disappeared after a month and none of the >committers know Perl, we have by committing it implicitly promised to fix >bugs and keep it up to date with new features. >- The obvious solution to this problem is to just not commit any driver >that we don't have enough expertise to maintain ourselves or are not >sufficiently confident in the author's commitment. But then you have a >very clear distinction between "first class," in tree drivers (probably >just Java, maybe Python too) and everyone else, which didn't sit right with >us either. > >On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 10:47 PM, J. D. Jordan <jeremiah.jor...@gmail.com> >wrote: > >> This is the way our community has operated for at least the 6ish years I >> have been involved with it. The Apache project develops the database, >> others in the community develop drivers. It's the way we have always >> worked, I'm sorry if you don't like that. >> > >-- >Jonathan Ellis >Project Chair, Apache Cassandra >co-founder, http://www.datastax.com >@spyced