On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 03:41:25PM -0800, Rodney Waldhoff wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Greg Stein wrote:
> > If you want to fix the oversight in J-C, then do so. Personally, I don't
> > believe it is possible, for the reasons that Robert has already described.
> > But I certainly won't stop you from trying.
>
> Greg, can you expand upon what you see as the "oversight" problem in
> Jakarta-Commons? I'm not sure what you mean by that.
This feels like it is getting off-topic, although there is still some
relevance since A-C is quite similar to J-C.
Take things like Hivemind, Jelly, and whatstheotherone. In the list that
Stephen posted recently, he labeled these as "should be TLPs." What the
*heck* are they doing way down in J-C if they are TLP material? How could
Hivemind grow to become a framework while sitting in Commons without
anybody really saying, "wow. that needs to move."
There is a "sandbox" which is labeled as some kind of playground for ASF
committers to monkey in. That is wrong. *Anything* in the ASF CVS
repository is owned by the ASF and requires the *SAME* oversight as larger
projects like Tomcat, httpd, or Cocoon. Label the sandbox all you want as
"unofficial" or "being worked on until it 'graduates'" or whatever. The
simple fact is that the mechanism encourages single committers to go wild
under the banner of the ASF.
The J-C development list is apparently so trafficked that individuals
cannot really keep up with it. To retain proper oversight, that must be
broken down and partitioned into manageable chunks. Quite doable. But the
PMC is still responsible, as a whole, for every chunk that is produced. No
matter how you might partition the *mailing lists*, that total amount of
traffic is still present. Then throw in all the other Jakarta traffic.
Then try to say that a group of a couple dozen people are directing *ALL*
of that effort. It just isn't believable.
The problem is that it has to be beyond believable. We have to be able to
stand up in a court and say "the PMC told those committers to do that."
There can't be a question about it.
Putting "one member from each (sub-)sub-project onto the PMC" is getting
there, but that still feels like the individual, rather than the PMC, is
managing the project.
The information overload is very well characterized by a reference
somebody made recently to a Jakarta report to the board. See Attachment D
in the March minutes:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2003/board_minutes_2003_03_19.txt
The most recent report defers much of the report to the Jakarta
newsletter. It doesn't summarize the state for the Board, and it doesn't
provide any insight into community issues, interactions, legal issues, or
forward thoughts of the PMC. We have this *massive* amount of code and a
*huge* community, and the PMC is not able to effectively report on what is
happening.
Is it just me? Maybe. But as a Director, I'm supposed to be able to review
this stuff and know whether Jakarta is going well/poorly. I have never
felt that I have enough information to really know that. And the scary
part is that I'm one of the more informed Directors -- I'm subscribed to
the Jakarta PMC list (along with one or two other Directors). The rest?
Scrappy info.
All that said, I can also state that it could be fairly said some of the
other PMCs might not be providing enough information either. In fact, that
has been raised here, "well, yah, but are you getting reports from the
httpd docs group?" Otherwise stated as, "but they suck, so we can too!" :-)
My point is that I may be unfairly focused on Jakarta. But I get to do
that; I'm just me, not the Board, and I get to have an opinion on where I
think the sore spot is. (and have no fear, I've got criticisms for most of
the PMCs :-) Can any of the PMCs operate Right And True(tm) ? Dunno, but
I think that the Jakarta PMC has the lowest hope because of the sheer size
of the projects under it. And J-C is one of those, and is arguably one the
*most* active projects within Jakarta, yet it almost has an extra "layer"
between it and the PMC -- it effectively has its own charter and rules and
other policies. There have been threats of a J-C "sub PMC" which have
(thankfully) been shot down.
I'll leave the comparison/contrast against A-C to others :-)
Cheers,
-g
--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
