Hi Russel! thanks for following up here. I've seen that others have commented on the points you raised, but I also wanted to chime in before this thread goes into a VOTE phase.
On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 3:50 AM, Russel Winder <rus...@winder.org.uk> wrote: > On Fri, 2015-03-13 at 08:55 +0100, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote: >> On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 6:07 PM, Cédric Champeau >> <cedric.champ...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > ...I see no point in wanting to reach a target number of >> > committers. Having a large number of quality contributions, more >> > contributors is IMHO more important than people having write access to the >> > repo.... >> >> Once again, there's no set number that you have to reach to graduate - >> it is not about numbers. > > I think something has gone very wrong with this point about committer > count, see below… I could see where you're coming from, but my personal experience around incubator suggests that this could only be a problem if the folks who may have a stake in the project are not recognized during the incubation phase. See bellow for more details: >> As I said before, being a committer does not necessarily means commit >> code - if someone's a project evangelist for example and you'd like >> them to be recognized as a core team member the only way in an Apache >> project is to make them a committer (and maybe PMC member). As in >> "committed to the project", even if they don't write code. > > I think this is a fundamentally wrong metric. > > I have been associated with the Groovy programming language since 2004. > Do I have commit privileges, no. Am I part of the Groovy community? > Well I would say yes, and if you ask people at Groovy-related, > DevoxxUK-related, ACCU-related conferences "Is Russel Winder a part of > the Groovy community", I think those that knew my name would say > definitely. Likewise "Is Russel Winder a strong Groovy advocate with a > history of converting people to Groovy/Gradle/Spock/GroovyFX/GPars?" > would get a lot of yes answers. Am I a committer to the Groovy project, > no. Do I feel I have to gain status as a committer to validate my > position in the Groovy community? No. This is where ASF starts being a really special kind of foundation. While the committership status most definitely allows you to push bits into source code repository, what it really signifies is your commitment (no pun intended) to the project. This is a very subtle, but a very important distinction that Incubator folks are trying to emphasize with every poddling. Poddling's community is NOT only developers, but all the other folks who make the community vibrant as well. Now, given that a formal recognition of a committer could be somewhat time consuming, I've seen a few cases in the past where a PMC approached a prolific contributor to invite him or her to join a project in a more official status and received a polite decline. To me this shows a great degree of maturity and responsibility, but the fact that the offer was made in first place shows that the project is functioning as a true ASF project. Now, I don't have a benefit of following Groovy development history for as long as you have (I've started my journey somewhere around '09). That said, from what I've seen -- you're definitely one of the 'Groovy folks'. Thus, as a mentor, I am going to make sure that Groovy podling does the right things and reaches out to the folks like you. More on the process here: https://community.apache.org/newcommitter.html > With The Groovy Project seeking to become a TLP of the Apache > Organization, I have been taking a peek at some of the writing on The > Apache Way. The phrase that springs immediately to my mind is "Community > over Code". Most of the discussion in this thread though is about the > number of committers, as though only committers are part of the > 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. You're absolutely correct. The community is way bigger than PMC and also bigger than formally recognized committers. That said, making sure that merit is recognized with invitations is one of the things we feels helps us run great communities as smoothly as possible. > So I would say that status within the community is unrelated to status > as a committer, and health of the project is likewise unrelated to the > number of committers. If The Apache Way requires a person to be a > committer to be considered a recognized person in a community, then I > say the metric is wrong and Apache should reconsider its metrics. > > Having ways and means to ensure releases, that pull requests come in, > that mailing lists are vibrant and constructive, that Groovy evolves to > the needs of mankind (not just the current users) is almost, but not > quite, totally unrelated to the number of committers. Personally, I think we are completely on the same page. Please let me know if you have any suggestions wrt. wording of the proposal. We're planning to move to a [VOTE] phase sometime tomorrow (Wed) and I'd be really delighted to see you cast your vote. Thanks, Roman. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
