Hi Russel, On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 11:50 AM, Russel Winder <rus...@winder.org.uk> wrote: > ...I think the language of sustainability and committer status has to > change in this discussion...
I do agree very much with the overall idea that you're expressing, and I think it matches the spirit of Apache projects sustainability. We've been speaking about committers so far because that's what visible in the Groovy incubation proposal, but actually what the ASF cares about in terms of sustainability of the project is PMC members, as defined at http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html Apache projects are governed by their PMC, and what's important is to have a sufficient number of active PMC members for the project to operate. Releases and similar votes need 3 PMC members votes, so If a project goes below three active PMC members it cannot operate anymore and the next step is http://attic.apache.org/ where the project is frozen. Or a reboot where Apache members join the PMC until the situation improves, we've seen that in the past. So what's important is to have enough PMC members to operate (say >=5 to have some slack), and that group needs to renew itself as people usually don't stay forever. Now, for "mechanical" reasons one needs to be a committer to become a PMC member in Apache projects. It doesn't mean you'll ever commit anything, and I agree with your view that in a DVCS world it might be only a few people who actually commit to the core repository, but you need the committer status to become a PMC member. So it might be a good idea for someone who's a recognized Groovy advocate to eventually get on the Groovy PMC, to make them an official member of the team, as they are people who care and understand about the long-term future of the project. Those folks might not use their commit bit but they are trusted anyway so we don't really care if they use it or not. I hope this helps clarify things - for now I don't think any changes to the proposal are needed, and we can pursue this discussion once the Groovy podling is established. -Bertrand --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
