On 16 Nov 2003, at 19:23, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
Transcontinental flights are great to catch up on stuff.
On Nov 10, 2003, at 6:18 PM, robert burrell donkin wrote:
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.
Before we had representation of every Jakarta subproject on the PMC, we organized it so that there were one or more people on the PMC assigned to watch subprojects. We don't need that with full project rep on the PMC, but you are of course welcome to cover all if you have the time. As you are probably starting to realize, that doesn't scale :)
that didn't work though, did it?
(i thought that was the point of moving towards a httpd-style pmc.)
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.
Well, we can fix that. I think that more process isn't the answer - just making it clear and streamlined.
the process was broken but it is being fixed up now.
<snip>
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.
This is the bit that bugs me. Why should we be persuading anyone to do anything? I'll support and help move people out if they want to move out, I'll support A-C by trying to start/bring non-Java things there if I can and help some other way if I have no code to offer. But I'm not going to start trying to get people to move, especially with weird marketing like "You'll still be part of Jakarta but you won't be!"
the flatteners have presented a vision whereby jakarta would (eventually) become just a web site with the currently sub-projects managed by themselves. it seems to me that a reasonable description (of this condition) is that the project will still be part of jakarta but managed by another pmc. "linked from jakarta and retaining jakarta website editing rights" would be a more accurate (but longer) description.
the jakarta pmc has been criticized by ASF members a *lot* (and over a long period) about it's inability to persuade sub-projects to move to top level status. this isn't going to happen without some advocacy from within the jakarta community.
if the ASF membership isn't in favour of flattening then i'd hoped that at least one member would have said something. similarly, if the criticisms don't represent the consensus position of the ASF membership then i would have hoped to hear at least one dissenting member voice an opinion.
maybe the ASF members will have a chance to discuss these kinds of things at apachecon and come up with some clearer policies...
- robert
