Yes, very good summary of the discussion.
-> richard
Niclas Hedhman wrote:
Gang,
I have been at the ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam, and had an interesting talk with
Richard Hall, Karl Pauls and Marcel Offermanns of the Felix project (which I
and Stuart both are committers as well).
Now, the "Criticial Path" (so to speak) of these talks was something like;
"We who are not Eclipse fanatics should work more together and not dilute our
resources."
Now, the present Felix community thought it was probably still a good idea to
keep Pax as a neutral ground, where inter-operability is the main concern.
But they also feel that Felix should have a complete set of bundles for the
entire specification suite, incl the compendium.
My main concern revolves around the community model, which is dictated by the
Apache Software Foundation to be a meritocracy for Felix, and a "No Barrier"
approach here. Now, I think it was Richard who suggested that perhaps Pax
should be the sandbox of Felix, for quick and open collaboration outside the
current committership. In principle I think this is Ok, although this adds
some paperwork overhead (called Software Grant) when importing the codebase
to Felix. My interpretation of this would then mean that codebases not
directly relevant to the specification suites, present or future
The other suggestion (which I think was from Karl), was that Pax would
re-brand selected Felix stuff, which is confirmed inter-operable on other
platforms.
Many other smaller items were also discussed.
So, we (at the table) more or less agreed to the following definitions;
Apache Felix is a community strongly committed to the OSGi specification
suites and intend to build fully compliant implementations of these
specifications, current and future.
The Pax community is strongly committed to OSGi framework independency,
interoperability and open participation.
Now, to get more concrete, I would like to propose the following action plan;
1) Pax Logging and Pax Web codebases are moved to Apache Felix and becomes the
Felix implementation of these Compendium Specs. The primary developers of
these will become (if not already is) Felix committers.
2) Pax Logging and Pax Web remains "Pax" branded, and will continue to be
released out of the Pax project, possibly not in sync with the releases
from the Felix project, as ASF release rules are more rigid and hence
slow.
3) Pax Web Extender & Co stays in the Pax project, at least for now. If there
is specs heading in that direction, we can bring this up again.
4) An open invitation to all Felix and other OSGi developers to join the Pax
project at OPS4J. OPS4J is a "No Barrier" community, what we call "Wiki
brought to Coding". OSGi stuff that are not related to either the current
specification or ambitions to become specifications are probably better
served at Pax.
5) Pax will continue to encourage experimenation, and people interested in
OSGi will do themselves a favour of doing the experiments at Pax, as
Felix PMC will consider Pax community members for committer status at
Felix.
6) Felix "configadmin" and "fileinstall" are "imported" into the Pax ConfMan
suite. Work will start to ensure the interop and full spec compliance.
Others may follow as people have itches.
7) Felix and Pax will cross-reference each other on their websites.
Well, this is a proposal, mostly to the Pax community (Felix community is
CC'ed) and not written in stone. What do you all think?
IMHO, some projects at Felix should probably be moved over to Pax, to
encourage more participation from others. I leave it as an encouragement to
those who work on such candidates to bring this up themselves.
Cheers
