> community. Forgive me presuming to say this but this seems a > contradiction with The Apache Way as written about. Also it is very > CVCS/Subversion focussed. > > In a DVCS world, committers are just the gatekeepers of the central > mainline, the judges/jury as to what meets the quality criteria. They > are not the totality of the people who contribute, and they do not > define the community.
IMO, there is a mindset difference which is key, between the CVCS and DVCS world, and it all comes down to community over code. CVCS, in a way, reinforces the idea/concept that "we" are all working on this "single" project "together". There is a central project, and we are all working on *it*. DVCS turns that around; instead, I am working on *my version* of the project, and I ask that some of my works gets pulled into the "official" one. Instead of a community working together, we have a bunch of island contributors who occasionally throw code over a wall and "move on". Sure, it's great for getting a bunch of contributions, but not a bunch of *contributors* (as defined as people heavily invested and engaged). That is the supreme irony: DVCS project can claim a huge number of "contributors", but the reality is really a very, very small number of "committers". Apache tries to make each contributor a committer. That is why whenever I read about some great project on GitHub with "hundreds of contributors" I take it with a grain of salt; it would be like Apache counting every Bugz/JIRA patch, every emailed patch, etc as a "contributor". At Apache, since knowledge of the community is crucial for the health of the community, and that also means knowledge of the actual size, Apache needs to be more realistic and "accurate" on what that size actually *is*. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
