Hi Troy, I appreciate the effort and I think what you are asking for in the end is exactly how the Incubator process works. As I've stated several times before, Incubation is a way for the Lucene.NET community to be on the path of a self-determined PMC and to start with a clean slate of committers. As I have suggested multiple times before, I would go do http://incubator.apache.org/guides/proposal.html. The process is quite simple, for example see http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenNLPProposal. Name your list of committers, etc. and then put it up for a vote on gene...@incubator.apache.org. I'm happy to help set that up for you if you are throwing your name in the hat.
Some more thoughts inline below. Sincerely, Grant On Dec 30, 2010, at 12:09 AM, Troy Howard wrote: > Dear Lucene PMC, > > <snip/> > > This is following the pattern of 'Revolution' as defined in > http://www.apache.org/foundation/glossary.html#Revolution and detailed > by James Duncan Davison. Unfortunately none of the current committers > are involved in this process, and as such, this revolution is occuring > outside of ASF, rather than in ASF's source control. It also means > that these forks will never have the opportunity to be merged back > into the trunk. > > There is a strong community around this project. I would agree there is a decent user community (strong seems, well, a bit strong) but there is almost zero development community AFAICT (and I don't just mean committers.) > There are numerous > other significant and active open source projects in the .NET space > which depend on Lucene.Net as a library, as well as countless > commercial products that depend on it. There is a strong community > interest in seeing this project move forward and remain vital and > active. > > The sensible and correct action for the Lucene PMC is to remove all > four of the current committers from the Lucene.Net project, and > establish a vote for new committers to be assigned to the project from > the users community. Unfortunately, this is a conundrum for the current PMC. As I have stated before, none of us feel capable of judging who those people are and whether they get how the ASF works or what it takes to be a committer. > > A change of status will not help this project or it's community in any > possible way. New committers, who are interested, motivated, and > responsive are what this project needs. > > This is my personal request, but I believe that I speak for a > substantial portion of the Lucene.Net community by asking the Lucene > PMC to please cancel the current vote and address this problem in a > more appropriate and responsible manner. > > Please grant the Lucene.Net community the power to be self-determined > by enabling it's active and motivated members to choose a new group of > committers. Who are those people? Please name them and add them to a proposal. I would be happy to help guide you through the Incubator process. There was a bunch of people who volunteered on the original Oct. thread, gather their names, confirm their interest and add them to the proposal. > > On a related subject, it is notable that unlike other Lucene > sub-projects, Lucene.Net does not have representation within the > Lucene PMC, George is on the PMC. But yes, this is exactly the problem with Lucene.NET being a sub-project of Lucene and why it belongs as a standalone project. Even if .NET had 2 or 3 or 10, it is clear to me that it is not the right way to run the PMC (trust me, we tried it for a long time with many subprojects such as Nutch, Tika, Mahout, etc.) The ASF Board has made it clear that large umbrella projects are not best practice. > and as such, the PMC's decision making process is > occurring without any PMC member being directly involved with the > community or project. I further propose that once a new group of > committers is established for the Lucene.Net project that one of those > members be made a Lucene PMC member. This will assist the PMC in > better managing the project in the future. Why only one? Why not have your whole entire PMC be made up of people who care about Lucene.NET and have complete say over the direction of the community, the committers, etc? Being a TLP will do nothing to diminish your relationship with Lucene itself and will likely expand the visibility of the project.
