Release process and PMC oversight [WAS xerces-P: CVS, Release process and oversight]

[Berin Lautenbach <be...@ozemail.com.au>]

Dirk,

Have pushed this to general@ as well, as the following is a broader
question.

I meant to raise a related topic when I got back (next week), but this
seems like an opportune time.

In my wanderings and discussions around the Foundation I have found a
number of people (including at least one member of the board) indicating
that the PMC of any project is supposed to be formally approving all
releases for all code.

For example :

http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=general@incubator.apache.org&msgNo=2151

Apparently that means that umbrella PMCs, such as this one, are supposed
to be voting on releases for all sub-projects.  We don't do that.  To
date we have worked on the basis that there is a PMC member in each
sub-project that is doing the due-diligence.

Now I am not sure if that this requirement for more direct PMC oversite
is formally stated by the board anywhere, but given we have to do a
report for this month's board meeting (see e-mail yet to come) I thought
it might be worth putting the question to the board.  But I didn't want
to do so without getting some thoughts from the wider project first.

All thoughts very welcome.

I also think that (at the very least) the PMC might be able to step in
for the code with small committer bases, such as Xerces-P to help out
with the peer review.  But again - very open to thoughts.

Cheers,
	Berin


Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> We need help from this community (xerces-p-dev) to make sure that this
> project is still within the fold (and protection) of the ASF. Though we
> may be easy going at first - ultimately all ASF projects must adhere to a
> few things which allow the PMC and the board to have some level of
> oversight - and which meet our legal requirements.
> 
> Now the things I am perhaps missing in xerces-P are
> 
> ->	Release Process and Peer review
> 
> 		At the very least there should be something
> 		of a peer review and a +1 vote to ensure
> 		that all code which goes into CVS is reviewed
> 		by your peers - and that there is some
> 		sort of a trail of this.
> 
> In short - check out http://xml.apache.org/guidelines.html (Communication
> and Decision Making) and the mission statement. The later also has some
> very useful suggestions about posting links to CVS, bugtraqing, release
> schedules and so on.
> 
> I realize that some of this may not seem to be befitting a a code base
> which is this small -and essentially manageable by a single person. But
> ultimately it is our aim to ensure that projects are healthy beyond the
> lives of even a single developer. And the key asset of the ASF is to
> preserve that element of community and peer review.
> 
> So please give this some thought. If needed feel free to ask for help - in
> the most extreme case we have a whole group of people who do exactly this
> in the incubator (helping groups get started) - but also bear in mind that
> this is not an optional thing - ultimately the board is going to question
> the PMC's oversight - and we'll need to do something. A quick look in the
> real world around us does show that attending to the legalities of reality
> is crucial.
> 
> Dw
> 
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