On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 7:35 AM, Benson Margulies <bimargul...@gmail.com> wrote: > It seems that the people who show up at these projects are, almost > universally, responsible adults who are happy to comply.
The ASF is always going to require an iCLA before granting commit rights. That on its own poses a significant barrier to entry and will likely weed out the occasional problem case. It's a heuristic, but I think we can assume that people who go through with signing and sending in an iCLA tend to skew responsible, intellectually serious, knowledgable, dedicated and technically competent. Assuming a hard requirement on iCLAs and version control technology which is capable of full restoration without extraordinary effort, trusting committers by default ought to mean less total work for everyone -- and a better experience for new contributors. Schlepping around patch sets and getting them applied by proxy is a proven approach which has worked well for a long time and remains perfectly viable -- but having everyone work within the version control system's native capabilities takes less effort. > What I've presented, so far, is arguable a radical change to the usual > Apache culture. It moves 'karma from merit' entirely from the 'commit' > threshold to the 'supervise' threshold. I already know that there are > people at Apache who don't like the idea, or at least don't think it makes > sense for their projects. I'm not writing to suggest that this scheme be > forced upon anyone. This is comdev@. Here, I think, we talk about ways of > helping projects grow and succeed. To address one of the objections... A number of ASF projects unify their committer and PMC lists; it's a forcing function in service of having a project governed by its contributors. Relaxed committership requirements don't mesh well with this mechanism, but despite its elegance, it's only a means to an end -- so long as the project is elevating significant contributors to the PMC in a timely manner, there's no problem. Reasonable people can arrive at different conclusions about which technique is more important to a community's health. > Writing as the IPMC chair, I'm inclined to think that the Incubator would > to well to encourage this model for new projects. By far, the biggest > reason for podlings to fizzle is their failure to grow. I don't mistake > this for a magic bullet, but I think it could help. I agree that young projects which are competing for contributors in the open source marketplace have the most to gain. > 'Commit on request' means that the PMC has, potentially, > more people to supervise after less experience. Some projects will not see > this as a good tradeoff. Mature, popular projects tend to receive more contributions than they can handle; competent review becomes the scarce resource. I question whether an RTC project would really spend a lot of time cleaning up after newbie rule-breakers, though. Marvin Humphrey
