Antonio Gallardo wrote:
Stefano Mazzocchi dijo:
There is a proposal for the creation of an Excalibur TLP that will be discussed tomorrow by the ASF board. If that passes, I would expect things to run a little more smoothly on the community side.
Nothing against Excalibur and other projects try to be TLP. Seems to be a fever inside the ASF? Why?
For a long time, the ASF directors believed that "project containment" would increase communication and simplify incubation.
The Gump project showed that there was little (if any) correspondance between the dependencies and the containment, this (and the election of directors coming from the non-httpd world) yield as a result the suggestion that the ASF should suggest all project to be run like HTTPD, which is: no containment and the PMC is composed by the people who care about the code.
At the same time, the ASF board does *NOT* enforce this practice, it just suggests it.
Antonio is just looking for an explanation, he is not trying to fight.
The ultimate reason why containment is worse than top level is that PMC are the organisms that provide technical leadership to the various project and, more important, provide legal and community oversight.
When projects were too contained (for example think of maven starting in turbine hosted in jakarta) the board had *no* clue of what was going on.
This is potentially harmful.
The ASF board is ultimately responsible for legal issues, but it cannot scale to oversee the entire thing, so that's why the board is normally very happy to create new top level projects *if* the necessary community requirements of solidity and diversity are met.
It's a basic form of delegation to the ones who really care and should really do the job of managing and overseeing the project work and the less layers between the top and the bottom, the better, the lighter and the more efficient.
This *does* leave the question on what happens when too many top level projects are created, and I think this is something that the currrent board will have to face.
Hope this helps.
-- Stefano.
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