[DISCUSS] Pros and Cons of incubation requiring 2 mailing list migrations

[Andy Konwinski <an...@gmail.com>]

I'm not sure if this has come up before, but having been actively involved
in two projects that entered the incubator and eventually graduated (Mesos
and now Spark), I would like to start a discussion about the the pain that
comes with a 2 phase path for email list migration for projects that go
through the incubator.

When a mature open source project enters the incubator, it has to move
mailing lists from its existing solution (which for Spark was Google
Groups) to the apache incubator lists. This was a painful move for Spark
since many devs found the Google groups mailing list interface easier to
use, but I understand that as Apache, we value having all of our projects'
bits live on our own Apache infra. Also, once we discovered and set up
nabble, we had back a lot of the features we found most useful, especially
being able to see all emails in long threads (based on email subjects) all
on one page.

However, as Apache, we don't ask the project to move mailing lists only
once, we ask them to move twice: once when entering the incubator and once
at graduation. Though the second move is easier, it is still painful in our
case since (unless I'm missing something) you can't migrate a nabble
mailing list from the @incubator.apache.org to @apache.org and so now the
history of our projects email archives will be spread out over three
different locations.

Maybe other incubator projects haven't found the 2nd move to be very
painful and maybe search engines make this not a very big deal.

I'm just wondering if there might be any alternatives to this 2 phase
migration process that we as Apache could consider in the long term?

Andy

Re: [DISCUSS] Pros and Cons of incubation requiring 2 mailing list migrations

[Andrea Pescetti <pe...@apache.org>]

Andy Konwinski wrote:
> However, as Apache, we don't ask the project to move mailing lists only
> once, we ask them to move twice: once when entering the incubator and once
> at graduation. Though the second move is easier, it is still painful in our
> case since (unless I'm missing something) you can't migrate a nabble
> mailing list from the @incubator.apache.org to @apache.org and so now the
> history of our projects email archives will be spread out over three
> different locations.

You needn't reconfigure it, since the old (incubator) address is turned 
into an alias for the new one: for example,
http://markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Aorg.apache.incubator.ooo-dev
has an "incubator" reference in the URL, but it reflects the current 
archives of dev-AT-openoffice.apache.org.

Of course, this is not nice and not clear: I'm simply pointing out that 
you needn't reconfigure it.

Regards,
   Andrea.

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Re: [DISCUSS] Pros and Cons of incubation requiring 2 mailing list migrations

[Roman Shaposhnik <rv...@apache.org>]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Andy Konwinski <an...@gmail.com> wrote:
> When a mature open source project enters the incubator, it has to move
> mailing lists from its existing solution (which for Spark was Google
> Groups) to the apache incubator lists. This was a painful move for Spark
> since many devs found the Google groups mailing list interface easier to
> use, but I understand that as Apache, we value having all of our projects'
> bits live on our own Apache infra.

Its that plus the requirement that we have a guaranteed archives
of our public conversations.

> However, as Apache, we don't ask the project to move mailing lists only
> once, we ask them to move twice: once when entering the incubator and once
> at graduation. Though the second move is easier, it is still painful in our
> case since (unless I'm missing something) you can't migrate a nabble
> mailing list from the @incubator.apache.org to @apache.org and so now the
> history of our projects email archives will be spread out over three
> different locations.
>
> Maybe other incubator projects haven't found the 2nd move to be very
> painful and maybe search engines make this not a very big deal.

Personally, I don't see it as a big deal, but you're raising a vaild
point.

That said, there's a very basic value in clearly delineating incubating
projects from TLP ones. This applies not all publicly visible bits
of identification: web sites, version IDs, ML addresses, etc.

I believe that keeping the 'incubator' moniker part of everything that
a user may see helps to avoid confusion with a much bigger community:
a community of ASF observers. As such, it feels like a reasonable
price to pay.

Just my 2c.

Thanks,
Roman.

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