This is a timely message, since I'm currently presuming to close some old Mahout issues at the moment and it raises a related concern.
There's lots of old JIRA issues of the form: 1) somebody submits a patch implementing part of something 2) some comments happen, maybe 3) nothing happens for a year 4) I close it now At an early stage, this is fine actually. 20 people contribute at the start; 3 select themselves naturally as regular contributors. 20 patches go up; the 5 that are of use an interest naturally get picked up and eventually committed. But going forward, this probably won't do. Potential committers get discouraged and work goes wasted. (See comments about Commons Math on this list for an example of the fallout.) I wonder what the obstacles are to avoiding this? 1) Do we need to be clearer about what the project is and isn't about? What the priorities are, what work is already on the table to be done? This is why I am keen on cleaning up JIRA now; it's hard for even us to understand what's in progress, what's important, 2) Do we need some more official ownership or responsibility for components? For example I am not sure who would manage changes to Clustering stuff. I know it isn't me; I don't know about that part. So what happens to an incoming patch to clustering? While too much command-and-control isn't possible or desirable in open source, lack of it is harmful too. I don't think the answer is "just let people commit bits and bobs" since it makes the project appear to be a workbench of half-finished jobs, which does a disservice to the components that are polished. I have no reason to believe this SVM patch, should it materialize, would fall through the cracks in this way, but want to ask now how we can just make sure. So, can we answer: 1) Is SVM in scope for Mahout? (I am guessing so.) 2) Who is nominally committing to shepherd the code into the code base and fix bugs and answer questions? (Jake?) I'm not really bothered about this particular patch, but the more general question.
