On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 1:41 PM, ant elder <[email protected]> wrote:
> I had looked already, but ok Tim i went and looked some more but can't > find so much, do you have links to something specific you remember? > The main reasons brought up in the past against it which i can find > are that it might make labs get too comfortable here and that the Labs > PMC doesn't know how to vet releases. The later of those is hard to > understand given that all the Labs PMC are ASF members, the first of > those, if its really an issue, could be dealt with for example by > giving some so of limit or timeframe a lab can be here doing releases. The release issue was settled during the creation of the Labs PMC. Specifically, you want to search the members@ archive for the "labs.apache.org" thread. I'll take the risk and expose a bit of the private discussion here as it may be useful to have it publicly archived in the future: On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 9:49 AM, Stefano Mazzocchi <[email protected]> wrote: >> - (3) a rule of "no release tarballs" would render most open source >> projects pretty useless! > > If you were to attract a community of end users, maybe, but since labs > are meant to just distill a pure idea into some rough code that is not a > concern. > > Actually, this is a feature, not a bug: labs will feel suboptimal for > those who want to use it to abuse the foundation and route around > incubation. > > Think of it as a 'committers repository' with somebody watching over it. > > Or think of it as "the development equivalent of the community@ mail list". > > For those who want to "try something out and see what others think and > it's easy to explain the idea in code than in words" don't need > releases, specific mailing lists or additional community substrate. > > They are not doing it to build a community, they are doing it to build a > seed, that, if starts growing some attention, can become the start of a > community. > > At that point, they can decide to stop working and see if others pick it > up or push it themselves inside the incubator and properly form a > community around it. > > Labs will exhibit a very high mortality rate compared to the rest of the > ASF. This is, again, a feature not a bug. > > Since there won't be releases, the high mortality cannot reduce the > quality of our 'long term' commitment on project because users cannot > depend on it. > > On the other hand, the fact that mortality of labs is understood, > expected and taken into consideration in its own functional rules, > allows users to be 'wilder' and 'bolder' in their work, removing > themselves from the burdens of community development and can focus on > the creativity of showing their ideas with code. At the time several of us were very concerned about how much effort, real or imagined, starting new Apache projects required. The Foundation was also still transitioning into a more horizontal organization, spinning out new PMCs and breaking up Jakarta/XML/etc. Apache Labs was intended to be a broad "sandbox/commons" with a very low bar of entry and a shared discussion list to encourage experimenting with ideas and code *in Apache* instead of other hosted repositories, thereby leveraging and improving the existing trust and community within the ASF. I don't recall much concern that those involved in Labs were somehow not fit for vetting releases, rather, the entire release process would introduce more overhead than we wanted in this simple, shared repo. Moreover, we didn't want Labs to compete with any proper PMCs, creating conflict when someone brought another project's sandbox to Labs. Personally, I still like the idea of Labs, it's low maintenance and, at least at one time, served a purpose. -- J. Aaron // 傑仁 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
