To me, this is simple:

- Let's go back to CTR
- Sometimes a PR is appropriate

Forcing PRs for everything is just process over people, and Apache is
"community over code".

Gary

On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 1:28 PM Tim Perry <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Is the problem RTC? Or has better become the enemy of good enough in the
> reviews? I know I'm walking a fine line, but sometimes the best way to
> handle issues discovered in a code review is to open a separate ticket for
> that work. For me, the request to change the handling of paths as strings
> that was mentioned earlier falls into that category.... Sure, the person
> trying to change the code could clean up issues in the surrounding code,
> but must they? Seems like a high hurdle.
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 9:41 AM Matt Sicker <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > RTC is an abject failure at work, too. The same culture of “all the
> > existing code is sacrosanct but we’ll make sure to nit pick future PRs”
> > leads to a drop in code quality, proliferation of technical debt, and
> > pushes people to start new projects entirely to replace the legacy system
> > nobody wants to approve changes on anymore.
> >
> > The way it looks now, every subcomponent of this PMC has less than three
> > active maintainers. That’s essentially an Attic project.
> >
> > > On Jan 12, 2026, at 2:51 AM, Volkan Yazıcı <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hey Robert,
> > >
> > > I think you've touched an important point below, and allow me to address:
> > >
> > > On Sun, Jan 11, 2026 at 7:23 PM Robert Middleton <[email protected]>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > >> While I don't have hard numbers, it does feel that the number of
> > >> messages on the mailing list has gone down since RTC was implemented,
> > >> which implies to me that there's less discussion activity.
> > >>
> > >
> > > Unless it is necessary, I personally don't carry any development-related
> > > discussion to the mailing list anymore, and one can see this has
> > > already been like this before 2024 ― recall that RTC was introduced on
> > > 2025-04-10. That is, even when Piotr and I were full-time funded on Log4j
> > > in 2024, we were only bringing necessary discussion to the mailing list.
> > > Because, IMO, I don't see anybody helping besides us two. Christian and
> > > Piotr at some point thought we were overwhelming other non-paid
> > > maintainers, and this is the reason behind the friction between two
> > groups,
> > > let's introduce some sort of newsletter for our STF-funded development
> > > efforts. Guess what happened? Other maintainers did not even react, and
> > > Piotr and Christian rightfully stopped with the newsletter after a couple
> > > of attempts. In short, yes, the mailing list traffic has decreased, but
> > > this is not correlated with RTC. I think the right metric is triaged
> > issues
> > > and pushed commits, and these are stable, see my earlier response
> > > <https://lists.apache.org/thread/wl1y76q7bhfl1sv9sh2g964bc57llytm> for
> > > exact figures.
> > >
> > > AFAICT, the bottom line is, people who are actively contributing have no
> > > problem with RTC; on the contrary, they support it wholeheartedly. On the
> > > other hand, there is this other group of maintainers, whom contribute
> > > seldom, have PRs pending for their attention to reviews,  (almost) never
> > > help with external PRs/Issues, they just want to push two lines of code
> > for
> > > their weekend projects, and return back to their $dayjobs.
> > >
> > > I am also not able to understand the "$WORK type of job" argument. You do
> > > RTC at work for a reason, right? Doesn't that reason apply to Log4j?
> > Log4j
> > > is probably more important than any piece of software we deliver in our
> > > $dayjobs. Doesn't it deserve to be developed with software development
> > best
> > > practices?
> > >
> > > I'm tired of hearing "bureaucratic wall" blah blah. Do you want to help
> > > with the Log4j development? Great! There are dozens of tasks waiting for
> > > your attention in here <https://github.com/apache/logging-log4j2/issues>
> > > and here <https://github.com/apache/logging-log4j2/pull>.
> >
> >

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