On 10 Nov 2003, at 22:33, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
On Monday, November 10, 2003, at 05:15 PM, robert burrell donkin wrote:
On 10 Nov 2003, at 21:05, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
<snip>
Now oversight is another issue entirely, but one that is fixable. If moving projects from j-c to a-c solves the oversight problem, then whatever magic happens when a j-c gets to a-c could easily be applied to jakarta's PMC, right?
i'm not sure that it can.
for a few months now, i've been subscribed to most of the jakarta sub-project mailing lists. it started out with the mirroring but i stayed as an experiment (partly as a result of the constant criticism that the jakarta-pmc receives). last week my email client died. i've spent all last week rebuilding a new IMAP server and transferring my (very precious) email onto it. i still think that it's possible to supervise something as big as jakarta - but only just. i don't spend very much time coding now :(
You aren't the only one that supposed to supervise.
we're all suppose to supervise everything - we're certainly responsible for everything. subscription is an interesting experiment and is quite informative.
though i do strongly feel that the criticism of jakarta from the board has been unfair, i do think that there is a grain of truth in there. the official jakarta pmc is too small and has far too few active members for a project the size of jakarta. but jakarta's got too big and too diffuse for this to change easily or quickly.
there are major issues about getting more folks on the jakarta pmc. at the moment, there are *major* procedure difficulties that are preventing our newly elected being officially recognized by the board as well as social ones. it is going to take time to reach our goal.
What are the difficulties?
some procedural, some social. jakarta doesn't even have a proper rule for deciding when an election succeeds. i've lost one election vote already for a senior apache member. then there's the effort of persuading people to accept the nomination.
whatever the issues, the membership has stayed basically static whilst i've been a member even though numerous election votes have been passed.
<snip>
of course, some folks may see an ulterior motive. it will mean fewer product that i - and the rest of the jakarta pmc - are responsible for. (which may even free up some coding time :) but i really do think that there are products who need this move so that they can progress.
I keep hearing that, but as a PMC member myself, I don't see where it's inhibiting progress.
there are lots of committers in jakarta-commons who have IMHO proved themselves worthy for election to the jakarta pmc. but it's going to be a very, very long time before this will happen.
the flatter structure should mean that the goal of better supervision will be achieved for the products that move to apache commons quicker than we can achieve it for jakarta as a whole.
Why not just free j-c to be a TLP if it wants to?
wouldn't bother me but IIRC we've been around this particular territory before and the general opinion was that there doesn't seem to be much point having a separate language-specific jakarta commons top level project when there's already an apache commons project.
there's also the issue of whether the jakarta-commons community wants to become top level. there are certainly some who do but i suspect that most want things to stay as they are. i might be able to persuade a few components to move (and so gaining some momentum for a move that way) but persuading the whole of jakarta-commons to move is certainly beyond me.
i don't really see the problem with coorperating with greg and justin here. i have a feeling the pretty soon (given a sufficent influx of jakarta-commons components), the community atmosphere of jakarta-commons will infuse this place too - but with the added advantage that i get to bug greg and justin with the questions about licensing and so on that i get asked but can't answer ;)
- robert
