On Oct 3, 2006, at 11:46 AM, Noel J. Bergman wrote:
Roy T. Fielding wrote:
I don't care what the PPMC decides to do provided that it is the
PPMC that makes the decisions and that decision is made on an Apache
mailing list. Mentors have NO RIGHT and NO RESPONSIBILITY to make
decisions on behalf of a project as if they owned the project. The
Mentors are only there to help the project govern itself and, in
some cases, be counted as one of the people on the PPMC.
To be really picky, that is not quite accurate. I wholeheartedly
agree that
Mentors have no right to make decisions as if they owned the
project. They
are there to help and be part of the community decision making
process.
However, Mentors have the only binding votes. You have many times
decried
giving binding votes to people who are not on a PMC.
That's why we created the PPMC == the entire set of committers of the
podling and the Mentors. They do have binding votes on everything
*except* releases because we delegated that to them, right?
Fools may call it bureaucratic and too much overhead for "open
source",
but it is that adherence to basic principles of cooperative
self-governance that allows an Apache project to survive the passing
of fools. We exchange the efficiencies of individual dictatorship
for
a less efficient process that requires more people to be involved
(and
thus buy into) whatever decisions need to be made. We cannot
short-circuit that process while trying to instill it.
I entirely agree, which is why you should re-read the proposed
bootstrapping
process. It is entirely about what you just wrote, above. It is
entirely
about a bootstrapping process so that the project can be more
self-governing.
No, your proposed bootstrapping process is nothing more than a
"bait-and-switch" process with fancy clothing. You are assuming
that the mentors will do the right thing once they have the right
to make arbitrary decisions on behalf of the podling.
That isn't why we have these processes. If we could all just assume
that everyone is going to do what everyone else expects, then we
wouldn't need these processes at all. The process exists both to set
the proper expectation (committers == PPMC) and to enable the Mentors
to help without making decisions *for* the project. Above all, the
right process means people don't waste our time whining about it
after the fact.
The Incubator PMC (or any sponsoring PMC) should vote on a podling
based on the contents of that proposal. It should not vote on a
proposal
and then tell someone we appoint to go ahead and do anything they want
under the rubric of that project name. The podling-proposal has a list
of people that are going to be governing the project and that list is
the committers, not just the list of mentors. That is the only
bootstrap process that has ever been documented. A project that wants
a smaller group of people (or just its mentors) to be the sole source
from which bootstrapping begins should not list any committers on
the proposal. That way, when the sponsoring PMC votes to accept a
podling,
they do so knowing full well who is going to be making the next
decision.
Mentors are people we add to a project. They have nothing whatsoever
to do with the initial committer process other than helping the podling
make the appropriate requests to infrastructure.
....Roy
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