(CC from astrotaverna-users back to taverna-hackers. The discussion is
about pros and cons of a different management style of the project. See
http://smtp.iaa.es/pipermail/astrotaverna-users/20140528/thread.html)
On 28 May 2014 22:34, Alan R Williams <[email protected]>wrote:
> On 28-May-14 21:51, Stian Soiland-Reyes wrote:
>
> [snip]
> '
> > No, sorry, this 'con' seems to not fully be true, it seems you CAN have
> > confidential conversations with the project's Project Management
> > Committee "private" mailing list - but it is encouraged to have as much
> > as possible done in public.
>
> How does this relate (if at all) to support questions? What would happen
> to [email protected]
>
Anyone can provide support, of course - if myGrid will keep doing that,
then we may. It could possibly be listed as a 'Third party support' from
the Apache Taverna site, I guess we could no longer call it "official"
support.
A better, more public and engaging option would be encourage support
through the mailing lists (probably still acceptable for developers) or
more modern Stack Overflow-like web interfaces (which is more what the
users expect today). That is part of the community building - getting a
graph-based support network rather than a star-shaped one. Apache don't
care too much about how and where users communicate, it is the development
that needs to be based at Apache.
> > http://incubator.apache.org/guides/ppmc.html
> >
> > One could imagine in such a situation that the PMC would have broad
> > representation across committers and so would be able to make an
> > informed decission on such requests.
>
> Would committers to (say) the Stilts plugin count as committers to Taverna?
>
Stilts plugin sounds quite specific - although its current direction (I
assume you are thinking of Christian Brenninkmeijers evolution from the
AstroTaverna one?) is moving more towards being a 'generic table plugin'.
If it depends on LGPL libraries, like STIL(TS), then it still can't be part
of the Apache Foundation's Taverna release. If we have many such
dependencies that we are unwilling/unable to give up, then we have to admit
that moving to an Apache is not ideal for Taverna.
If the plugin stays as such, then everything is still fine (as long as it
is not a 'necessary' part of Taverna installation. For instance Apache
OpenOffice can optionally download GPL-licensed dictionaries on demand, but
works fine without dictionaries). Of course the developers of such plugins
would likely want to be part of the Apache Taverna community anyway (as
they would be part of the taverna-hackers community today); but not really
as a committer unless they have also been actively contributing to the Core
code base.
> I think it's more common to have a release delayed until something that
> a project considers urgent gets done. Everyone else might have been
> happy without the special feature.
>
So in those cases it could be that the Apache Taverna community would be
more pushed to get an intermediate release out without waiting for the
special feature; leading to additional work on doing two releases. So that
would be a downside, but it should be helped by moving to Taverna 3 and a
series of "often, but little at a time" kind of releases (which is tricky
today due to Taverna 2's plugin system requiring plugin re-releases for any
non-trivial Taverna updates, e.g. 2.4 to 2.5).
--
Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team
School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester
http://soiland-reyes.com/stian/work/ http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718
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