Re: Roles: user, committer, member, etc.

[Justin Mason <jm...@jmason.org>]

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Leo Simons writes:
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 08:16:49PM +1000, David Crossley wrote:
> > One thing that is bothering at the ASF is not having a clear
> > definition of the various roles.
> 
> Hmmm. I think there's a lot of people not bothered though. Not being
> clear may even serve a purpose.
> 
> > We seem to be having endless discussions at some projects about what
> > it means to be a committer and a PMC member and an ASF member.
> 
> Indeed. I have a hunch that "re-inventing the collaboration wheel" is a
> significant part of "the apache way". An organisational structure that
> is completely patching itself at every level has a lot of appeal.

Hmm.  Why does constant change have a lot of appeal?

We in SpamAssassin certainly found it confusing, for a while -- we assumed
that there was some central thought about this, then realised that no,
every project/subproject does it differently.

It would be nice to have an "overview" doc on a wiki somewhere, describing
different projects' approaches, to make this clear.  It would be
especially useful for incoming incubator projects, because in our
experience it was a major stumbling block.

Even just the links below would be useful. (we went looking ourselves
at the time, and I think got as far as Jakarta, APR, and httpd.)

> As Jakarta people "moved up the ranks" the process documentation written
> (I think by Jon Stevens initially) moved up with them. When that
> happened people disagreed with that process and it got patched. Some
> patches found their way back into the processes of various TLPs. Which
> bits hasn't been overly co-ordinated.
> 
> Compare
> 
> http://httpd.apache.org/dev/guidelines.html
> http://jakarta.apache.org/site/management.html
> http://jakarta.apache.org/site/decisions.html
> http://ant.apache.org/bylaws.html http://xml.apache.org/guidelines.html
> http://maven.apache.org/contributing/help.html
> http://apr.apache.org/guidelines.html http://tcl.apache.org/about.rvt
> http://gump.apache.org/bylaws.html
> http://geronimo.apache.org/get-involved.html
> http://beehive.apache.org/contributors.html ...
> 
> TCL talks of a "project maintainership committee". HTTPD still refers to
> "Apache Group" every now and then. Maven, SpamAssassin and Geronimo
> don't describe their processes at all on their website.

nope! ;)   add http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/ProjectRoles to the
list.

> XML says "The
> Chairman or any member may be removed from the PMC by a 3/4 vote of the
> PMC" which is false (the chairman is a board-appointed officer and
> cannot be removed by the PMC at all). Gump defines "committer" but
> doesn't actually really keep track of them (when gump went TLP there was
> really no initial list of people that might be considered PMC members)
> because all of Apache is allowed to mess around with the code. Beehive
> has 0 pages devoted to saying something like "get involved!", the only
> thing that comes close is a news blurb on their front page. SpamAssassin
> has a list of PMC members at the top of their CREDITS file with links to
> Amazon wishlists. That's smart innit! :-)

;)

I think the committers also have a few.

- --j.
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Re: Roles: user, committer, member, etc.

[Leo Simons <ma...@leosimons.com>]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 12:45:04PM -0700, Justin Mason wrote:
> > Indeed. I have a hunch that "re-inventing the collaboration wheel" is a
> > significant part of "the apache way". An organisational structure that
> > is completely patching itself at every level has a lot of appeal.
> 
> Hmm.  Why does constant change have a lot of appeal?

Not quite what I meant. I meant that it is good to have people thinking about
how they want to run their own project and it is good to give them some
leeway. And incorporating change as part of our processes is better than
setting things in stone.

Messiness and confusion seem to be a consequence. Those don't have much appeal
at all :-)

> We in SpamAssassin certainly found it confusing, for a while -- we assumed
> that there was some central thought about this, then realised that no,
> every project/subproject does it differently.

Indeed. Incubating a project at apache is hard, innit?

The SpamAssassin proved very capable of dealing with all the weirdness and
confusion and inconsistencies. I have the idea (not very founded on solid
research) spamassassin is doing well without requiring much "active
oversight" from other parties. I think that partly that may be because the
project was allowed to "carve out" its own space in the apache landscape,
perhaps taking its turn at defining some bits of what that landscape actually
is.

> It would be nice to have an "overview" doc on a wiki somewhere, describing
> different projects' approaches, to make this clear.  It would be
> especially useful for incoming incubator projects, because in our
> experience it was a major stumbling block.

Aye. David has put in lots of work along these lines along with a handful of
other people. The "handful" is why there isn't better documentation.

I had hoped that the Incubator would be self-sustaining (in that people who
were brought in through new projects would stick around and be helping out
with incubation and other foundation-wide tasks). While there are some
obvious exceptions, it seems they really are exceptions to the rule.

cheers!

LSD


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