On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Justin Erenkrantz wrote: > - I don't quite believe it'll be the same sort of umbrella as J-C or Jakarta > itself. We're trying to advocate that groupings should receive their own > topic-centric mailing list. We're trying to advocate a higher degree of > interaction with the PMC, etc. From all reports, J-C is starting to collapse > under its own weight. Something has to give.
I think it has problems, but "collapsing under..." is a little too dramatic. I think that J-C has some (easily remedied) problems - (I see J-C turning into an umbrella project inside of an umbrella project [Jakarta]). People decide that we need another "services framework" or a "math library", and from my perspective J-C offers the path of least resistance. Math as first proposed was to be a simple "package" ocntaining a limited set of utilities - it has since grown to something much larger than originally intended. Things like HiveMind, Jelly, Math - are not simply common components, I don't see why they wouldn't be either TLP or another subprojects. I also think that J-C works very well in projects like Commons Lang, BeanUtils, Digester, Codec, EL, JXPath, etc. - I see no reason to move something like Digester to A-C. These projects do not have the volume of dev mail to sustain an independent community, and are very limited in scope. > - It's isn't quite a lateral move as you'd make it out to be. I believe it, > at best, would be cutting out one level of bureaucracy (namely the Jakarta > PMC) and restoring power to committers working on code. This has the > advantage of allowing the actual developers working on the projects to have a > voice in the PMC (and, legally, this is as they are required). I've heard > concerns from J-C folks that they don't really have any direction from the > Jakarta PMC on what to do, nor do they have any say. Yet, in A-C, there > would > be *at least* one Commons PMC member per project who is active - the Commons > PMC needs to ensure that as part of its oversight responsibility. This seems to be in direct opposition to many things I've heard in the last few months. It is my understanding that either the Board or the Members decided that every active commiter should be on the PMC. > - A learning place where these reusability projects (or groupings of > projects) > that do become 'big enough' to become TLPs. As these collections of > functional groupings are defined and projects start to develop communities > that can manage themselves, I believe the Commons PMC should advocate that > they should be promoted en masse as a new TLP. This respects the current > feelings (among some) that the ASF should reorganize around very specific > TLPs > rather than broad PMCs. +1 there should be no aversion to have many TLPs - I point to successful communities outside of the ASF as proof of what focus can bring (Hibernate and FreeMarker are just two examples). Tim O'Brien
