infrastructure and reorg

[Steven Noels <st...@outerthought.org>]

Hi all,

don't know whether the community@ list already has a lot of subscribers, 
so I'm taking the liberty of crossposting. Asbesto suit on :-)

In the heat of the discussion, it appears to me that Brian's idea of 
switching to SourceCast as the underlying administration system for 
administering ASF resources has been put aside (or postponed, or gently 
ignored, whatever).

Related to that, I'm stuck with a similar hardware/infrastructural issue 
  being somewhere in between infrastructure and incubator.

I have been doing some preparation (and hardware/bandwidth acquisition) 
to support open source development on top of Cocoon. We (some 
Cocoon-friendly people) have acquired a box specifically tuned and set 
up for Java/Tomcat/Cocoon web hosting, and baptized it 
http://cocoondev.org/) - very similar to http://www.mozdev.org/about.html

The idea is to help people develop and showcase Cocoon-applications. The 
reason why we did this, even though an xml-cocoon2-apps module exists, 
is that people do not only need CVS access and mailing lists for growing 
a project and its community, but also the possibility of showcasing what 
they have done. Hence the current emptiness of the xml-cocoon2-apps 
module. This is currently very difficult to achieve with the available 
ASF equipment - for reasons I understand.

At the same time, we lower the barrier for people willing to become part 
of cocoondev.org, and potentially be a migration path (similar to 
Nicola's Krysalis) to proper ASF projects.

Already, we have a number of candidate projects wanting to move in 
(while equipment is still being set up to mirror the setup of the Apache 
boxes as close as possible) - but now I'm wondering how we could 
interrelate/cooperate with the incubator idea.

While we offer everything a project might need (CVS/shell 
accounts/ezmlm/Tomcat/Cocoon/DNS), we don't require a project to host 
everything on our hardware, they could as well have their sourcecode in 
some incubator CVS module, run mailing lists on ASF equipment, and only 
have a showcase/demo running on our equipment.

On the other hand, we would like to see fellow Cocoon-developers help 
each other along and form a community on their own, while still 
maintaining the noise level on cocoon-dev/-user@xml.apache.org to a 
minimum - since those should be related mostly to the development and 
use of Cocoon itself - not the apps build on top of it.

So what I'm basically stuck with is defining some kind of liaison with 
the incubator project, specifically with Cocoon-based projects in mind. 
Maybe it's too much of a niche from the ASF POV currently, but since 
interest for Cocoon has been increasing dramatically over the past year, 
I reckon a number of those Cocoon-based projects will be starting the 
search for "project development and showcase" infrastructure RSN, and I 
would like to welcome them to http://cocoondev.org/, while not 
alienating them from the ASF community in the process, and making the 
move to incubator as easy as possible.

I'm not too confident on the road I should take. Having an A record 
alias of the form cocoondev.apache.org might establish some sort of 
credible branding of the initiative, ensuring our users they won't be 
alienated from ASF. Copying the incubator guidelines verbatim as our own 
guidelines might also be a way to move forward, but might confuse users 
on who is actually leading/sponsoring the initiative.

I'm not sure, but I expect other community-led initiatives like this 
might exist for other Apache projects - and I'm wondering how we could 
eventually be recognized under/banned from the ASF umbrella. Tigris.org 
comes to mind.

Does anyone want to comment on this?

Regards,

</Steven>
-- 
Steven Noels                            http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center
stevenn@outerthought.org                      stevenn@apache.org