Hi Attic team, I just subscribed here - we had a discussion about this at yesterday's Board meeting (thanks Henk for joining that), I think it's good to clarify this and here looks like the best place.
IIUC the first occurence that just happened is https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ATTIC-169 I didn't have a good phone link for that meeting yesterday so might have missed some details but I felt like there was some confusion between "project" and "codebase". IMO, focusing on the adoption of the codebase, while keeping the project's state as "in the Attic" with as few changes as possible helps simplify and clarify what's happening. So here we go, here's a tentative set of principles for PMCs adopting codebases which are currently in the Attic. 1. When a project goes to the Attic, its PMC is terminated, which means that the Apache Project ceases to exist. 2. The project's codebase, on the other hand, continues to exist in the Attic. It's just frozen, so the ASF is not expected for example to provide security fixes for code that's in the Attic. 3. If there's renewed interest in the project, it might be revived by recreating a PMC, either via the Incubator or directly, as happens for top-level projects. I don't think this has happened so far but it feels easy to handle using existing processes. 4. Another option for the *codebase* (or part of it) to become active again is for an existing PMC to adopt it, which is what happened in https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ATTIC-169 If the above makes sense, I suggest the following (also tentative) rules, assuming the codebase that's in the Attic belonged to project FROM and it's the TO PMC which adopts it. a) TO can adopt the FROM codebase that's in the attic, provided it's not been adopted by a different PMC so far b) Various modules of FROM might be adopted by different PMCs c) For this to happen, a positive vote of the Attic PMC is sufficient, on this list, backed by a JIRA ticket to describe the details and actions d) When that happens, the FROM website is updated to indicate that TO adopted the code, saying something like "The TO PMC has now adopted the FROM codebase", indicating exactly which part(s) of the codebase have been adopted. No other change is made to that website, it remains frozen apart from that note. TO can copy the website content under their own to evolve it, but the original FROM.apache.org domain content must stay as it was when FROM moved to the Attic. e) The Attic website is updated with that same information f) TO can release the FROM modules that it adopted, using names like TOO-FROM-module-V1.2.3 to differentiate those artifacts from the older ones that FROM released - adding the TOO prefix to their names, both for release archives and things like Java jars, etc. g) Java package names etc. can remain as they were, for convenience How does this sound? Maybe this is how ATTIC-169 has been handled, though the note at http://attic.apache.org/ saying that XMLBeans was "revived" can be understood as the project getting back to life which is not the case IMO - it's only the codebase that's been adopted. Also, I don't see an Attic mention at http://xmlbeans.apache.org/ and I think that's not good as per d) above. -Bertrand
