On voting (Was: [Release Candidate] 0.1-incubating)

[Jukka Zitting <ju...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Dec 28, 2007 10:32 PM, Keith R. Bennett <kb...@bbsinc.biz> wrote:
> BTW, I may not have the time to thoroughly review the release candidates.
> What level of confidence do you suggest as a criterion for voting?  (In
> other words, if I take a brief look, and it looks ok, would you like me to
> vote +1, or only vote +1 if I review the release candidate thoroughly?)

There are no strict guidelines on how a (P)PMC member should vote
(otherwise we could just automate the process :-). Instead each member
is expected to apply whatever technical and procedural quality
criteria they think should apply to a release. The release candidate
should also be audited for compliance with Apache policies (see [1]
and [2]), but the extent of such audit is left to each PMC member to
decide.

By voting +1 you basically state that you've looked at the candidate
and don't see any obvious flaws in it. A -1 vote requires also an
explanation of a valid issue in the release candidate. The requirement
of three +1 votes for a release guarantees that at least three pairs
of eyes have looked a the candidate and found no obvious issues, so on
aggregate we can be reasonably sure that the release is OK. Notably a
-1 vote on technical issues (like a bug not being fixed or a feature
not included in a release) will not veto a release, but a qualified
legal or policy issue should be treated as a veto.

Some time ago I wrote a release auditing guide for Jackrabbit that you
may also find useful, see [3].

[1] http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Incubation_Policy.html#Releases
[2] http://www.apache.org/dev/release.html
[3] http://markmail.org/message/zsjhrvgpnd3ouhi5

On Dec 29, 2007 3:09 AM, Keith R. Bennett <kb...@bbsinc.biz> wrote:
> The +1 was for the quoted text, that we vote on something that has been
> frozen, for the reasons given by others.

Please avoid posting unrelated +1s or -1s on vote threads.

This is another good reason to scrap and restart all vote threads that
become discussions. Optimally, a vote thread only consists of the call
to vote, a sequence of votes, and the tallied result. Related
discussions are best branched off to separate threads by modifying the
subject line (see this message).

BR,

Jukka Zitting