In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Justin Erenkrantz writes: >Okay, let's do this: If you're on this list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) and you are >already a committer to some other ASF commons project and would like to help >the ASF Commons by lending your insight and help us to manage this endeavor, >I'd like to solicit your self-nomination for Commons PMC. Your stated >interest in joining the PMC and prior experience elsewhere within the ASF >would be suitable justification for me to nominate you to the rest of the PMC.
I mulled this over for a bit, trying to decide if I had the time to participate, and I've decided I do. The reason I'm interested is because both code libraries I've donated to Apache (technically, the user/developer community donated one of them) would probably have been a better fit in an Apache Commons (had it existed at the time) than Jakarta, despite the fact that Jakarta projects use the code. The reason they wound up in Jakarta was likely because Jakarta had to some extent become the de facto umbrella for non-XML Java projects. Now that Apache has expanded the scope of projects it hosts, it's possible to narrow the scope of each of the projects. Whereas before we would have debates about whether a build system or a regular expression/text processing library was in scope for Jakarta, now the build system can become its own top-level project and the misfit libraries, at their communities' options, can move into Apache Commons. In the past I was opposed to rejecting useful subprojects just because they weren't neatly in scope, but now that there's an appropriate place within the ASF for just about every project (e.g., ultimately subprojects can become top-level projects), I don't think it's a bad thing to try to place subprojects under more appropriate top-level projects. And yes, I understand that the big question is how to decide what is appropriate. I tend to disfavor purely language-based categorization. However, the Apache Commons PMC only needs to establish what's appropriate for Apache Commons. From the APR example, there's at least the implication that if a reusable library becomes large enough by some definition (a large enough community, enough subcomponents, ...) that it would be better served by promotion to top-level project status. In any case, with regard to "prior experience elsewhere within the ASF," to the extent that I'm responsible for the original code, I've donated Jakarta ORO and Jakarta Commons Net to the ASF (although both subprojects have since seen contributions from many developers; Commons Net more so than ORO). I served on the Jakarta PMC a couple of years ago and am doing so again. Recently, my main activities have consisted of code maintenance (reviewing and applying patches, responding to bug reports, etc.), encouraging code contributions to expand the developer community of the projects I'm invovled with (Commons Net has been successful in this regard), and accidentally stirring up discussions about how to handle "mature" projects on [EMAIL PROTECTED] :) I've written rather much more than I intended, but have said rather less than I thought. In the end, I've always been more of a library/tool builder than an application builder, so the place I think I can do the most good in the ASF is Apache Commons. But we have a bootstrapping problem (there is as of yet no Apache Commons code) and I'd like to help get the project off the ground. daniel
