On Nov 17, 2003, at 5:51 PM, robert burrell donkin wrote:
<snip>
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.
I guess I'll have to go back and review. I thought the criticism was aimed at oversight rather than some desire for structural change.
i think that there are many members who believe that effective oversight is not possible without structural change. moreover, i believe that some of these (maybe even a majority) think that unless the community is willing to undertake these structure changes then (for reasons of oversight) then the community will need to be reformed from outside.
I believe that having umbrella PMCs is a *good* thing, because when you break things out, you just move the problem elsewhere, namely the board.
personally speaking, i think that this is a very real danger. on the other hand, the opinions i've heard expressed by the board (abeit in a personal capacity) seem to indicate to me that they are confident they can manage things.
Having an umbrella PMC that is a community of like minded people (Java people, XML people, whatever...), then I think that you have a better ability to manage because of the common understanding. Of course, there still is the issue of how well that PMC operates, but that's not what we're talking about here.
i agree up to a point. i think that umbrella pmc are more effective at generating community spirit. i do think that sometimes that it can be hard to miss commonalities which exist with apache people working in different languages. certainly, james committers have noted commonalities that they didn't recognize before they moved out from jakarta.
on the other hand, i definitely believe that there's a limit beyond which they cannot scale effectively. two symptoms that jakarta is now too big:
1 i'm no longer familiar with all the major developers (those worthy of election to the pmc)
2 i can no longer subscribe to all the lists at jakarta and read every mail (whilst staying sane)
i think that the big mistake was allowing umbrella sub-projects. by this i mean sub-projects with multiple development mailing lists and sub-sub-projects each working on their own separate products. i don't think that these can be effectively supervised and lead to community fragment.
i'm a fan of big development mailing lists. i think that umbrella projects can work providing that each mailing list has enough active pmc members subscribed. i don't think that one pmc member (per mailing list) is anywhere enough (but it's a start). i've argued strongly that the supervision system we have in the jakarta-commons is effective (lots of pmc members all subscribed). it has no single point of failure. my opinions do not seem to be shared by the board, though.
if the ASF membership isn't in favour of flattening then i'd hoped that at least one member would have said something.
I'm a member, and speaking for myself, I think that forced flattening is a bad idea. I think that voluntary flattening by projects that want to do that is a good idea. And to keep my bases covered, I think that good PMC oversight is critical here.
pmc oversight is critical anyway :)
i'd say that it's very possible to have a flat (but rotten) pmc. i'm pretty sure that the board would find out pretty quickly if an umbrella pmc turned sour - but i'm not so sure about a small flat one.
i don't think that any projects will opt to leave jakarta without at least some persuasion. this might be the tactics applied by sam to maven or might just need the possibility to be raised at the right time (jetspeed and pluto to a new portals.apache.org pmc, probably).
one of the majors reasons why there is resistance to leaving jakarta is the effect of being listed on the front page of the jakarta web site. i've tried hard to keep links to projects that have graduated and i'd be willing to fight to allow sub-projects that leave to become sub-projects of other pmc's to retain links from either the products list or a (new) graduated list (i'm think now of jetspeed and pluto).
- robert
