Hi, > I would like to get some clarification on the projects degrees of freedom > under ASF from our mentors.
As long as you follow the Apache Way you are free to do what you want. We have a lot of history and over time have built up guidelines which describe what has worked well. Sometimes it's not obvious why these guidelines may exists, so ask if you don’t know or understand or think they seem strange. Sometimes these guideline might not work for your project, that’s OK, if you want to do things in a different way discuss it with the incubator PMC. There is not one path for all projects. > Am I correct in understanding that ASF requires project dev communications > to be in the open and publicly available” ? Yes. > Does this need to be on only these mailing lists we have been provided by > ASF? It’s preferable yes. But if they can be archived and searchable that’s fine. Often a solution is automatically sending that conversion to a mailing list or bringing back a summary to the list. > I ask this for the reason that the lists are very hard to follow. Use subject line to guide you, Id suggest using an email client that supports threads and rules to group messages. You don’t have to read everything. Given it is early days, there’s a lot of noise, I think this will get better over time. > Who is the moderator on a list? There’s a couple of moderators, if you want to be one just ask, but that’s more to accept/reject emails from people who are not subscribed. All emails from a subscribed address are automatically accepted. > - If someone is being abusive is that left on the list forever? In general yes. It hard to remove emails and they are archived in many public places. > How does one correct a mistake in their post? Generally just reply and correct the mistake. > Is it an ASF edict to not use the existing NuttX slack? No but we would prefer conversation on the mailing list for reasons mentioned above. > Other than the release procedures and distribution tools/locations is the > project free to use any tool we want for development, testing and CI? In general yes. Some tools are easier to use as Infra already supports them. > Given the history in the name of ASF: Are we required to support changes > by patches? > - What tool does apache support for avoiding duplicate work on > patches? Is there a semaphore? > - How does a group review a patch collaboratively? There’s no ASF requirements here, it's up to the project to work that out. Hope that helps and answer your questions. If you have any or just ask. Thanks, Justin