On Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 11:26:45PM +0100, robert burrell donkin wrote: >... > anyway, rather than go over all the old arguments again, i'd say that it'd > be better to go forward by looking at the positives that apache commons > can offer (rather than getting into an argument about the jakarta mission > scope).
Well, to be honest, that is kind of a weird question to me. "what do you have to offer?" Euh... project space? I mean really. The ASF is the same across the board. I don't see that there needs to be a one-up-man-ship here. "ooh! we have X and they don't!" That may not be what you meant, but when I read "what do you have to offer", that is how I translate it. Personally, I see Commons provide a community for building reusable components. Those components are independent, rather than beholden to some larger project. Of course, there *does* need to be recognition and respect for your users, so versioning and API stability is very important. But Commons *is* a separate TLP which sets its own goals. The Commons Project also has a bit of self-definition to complete, too. One of the outstanding questions is partitioning of commit rights. At the moment, I'm in favor of zero partitioning within TLPs. If you're a Commons committer, then you have rights on all components. Social norms and recognizing your knowledge/strenghts/weaknesses should keep people from breaking components outside of their typical areas of work. But from a responsibility standpoint, it is expected that all Commons committers would become part of the PMC, and that PMC is responsible for everything. Partitioning just monkeys all of that up. There is also a question of whether to have a sandbox. Do we allow people to run with a good idea? To start it from scratch? If we allow "from scratch" components here, then do we impose a minimum number of committers "signing up" to work on it? (i.e. no one-man component starts) Things like that. Oh, and the part of me that prefers unification rather than replication wants to ask, "so Apache Commons will be here in five years. how about the other foo-commons projects?" :-) hehehe... Cheers, -g -- Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
