On Aug 18, 2012, at 2:11 AM, Jean-Baptiste Onofré <j...@nanthrax.net> wrote:
> When you are not committer on a project, and you contribute a patch, you have > to explicitly grant your license to ASF. To do that, you just mention it by > checking "Grant ASF" when attaching the file to the Jira. Yes, i appreciate that, but I thought we were trying to clarify whether Github pulls were acceptable means of providing patches. It seems that they are not acceptable for non-committers, so the fact that there are pull requests obscures the fact that those pull requests are unusable and therefore not statistically relevant. Having said that, it would be good to concretely clarify that Github pulls are not acceptable for non-committers, avoiding any interpretation that Github is a means by which non-committers can provide value to the project. It's important because it is actually very difficult in my experience to get patches applied, which dissuades people from contributing and makes it appear that nobody is interested when there may in fact be many folks interested in contributing but find it too unproductive to do so. These misinterpretations are very damaging to a project since valuable contributions (however small or unimportant to one group) are never made, and folks of a mindset similar to the person who never contributed do not in turn ever start using the project because these features never made it in. This is very much an anti-pattern in ASF projects, but I've found it pretty common as well, so please don't interpret this as me calling out Karaf in particular. Brian
