Revolutions (was Re: Non-discussion emails)

[Ted Husted <te...@gmail.com>]

On 1/17/06, Patrick Lightbody <fo...@opensymphony.com> wrote:
>  * Jive Forums certainly can filter the email, and I may turn that on, but then I've bypassed
> the team rather than working with them. I don't like that approach at all.

I think most of the "old-school" committers would have gone ahead and
setup the filters. Then, once the filters were up and running, it
would be easy for everyone to see that they are a good idea.

Much of this viewpoint stems from the ASF notion of "Revolutions". Our
"Rules for Revolutionaries" were first documented in an email by the
then PMC Chair of Jakarta during the Tomcat Wars. Many of us have
referred to that email so many times since, that it has become part of
the incubator documentation.

* http://incubator.apache.org/learn/rules-for-revolutionaries.html

Committers often do things on our own, as a whiteboard, and then share
them with the group when ready. When Don started Ti, he did it on his
own instance of Trac. Nial had up a a site for LazyDynaActionForms for
a long time before we made them part of the distribution. Hubert has
several Struts extensions going, some that he might contribute some
time, others that he may not. To get everyone onboard with Subversion,
I had a test conversion done at WUSH.NET first, so that the committers
could see exactly how great it would be.

We don't consider any of this bypassing the team, we consider it
Darwin in action. In concert with the Rules, most projects now have
sandboxes where any committer can try something new.

Along with Jive Forums, I would also like to use Confluence as our
wiki. Right now, the infrastructure team is not up to the challenge of
maintaining a Confluence instance. Eventually, I'm sure that
circumstance will change, but, in the meantime, Atlassian has
graciously offered Confluence space to any ASF project that wants to
use it.

*  http://opensource2.atlassian.com/confluence/oss/dashboard.action

One day, we hope to move these wikis to a ASF server. But, in the
meantime, we're not breaking any rules or traditions. In fact, we are
realizing one of our dearest rules: The Rule of Revolution.

I think it would be great if we could do the same thing with Jive. I
don't know if Jive would be willing to sponsor it for us, the way
Atlassian did or not. But, I would be happy to help administer a Jive
instance, the way I help with the Confluence instance.

Ideally, after testing the idea at Open Symphony, we would want to
open the Jive forums up to any other ASF projects that were
interested. I'm sure many of my favorite projects, like iBATIS,
MyFaces, and Roller, would also love to have Jive forums, especially
for the User lists.

So my suggestion would be to:

* Setup a set of five Jive forums for our five email sources: User
posts, Dev posts, Wiki posts, Issue posts, and Repository posts.

* Use filters to separate some of these from the monolithic dev@ email source.

* See if we can setup a shared Jive instance for any ASF project to
use, perhaps sponsored by Jive Forms or Contegrix.

When the time is right, we can propose moving Jive to an ASF server.

-Ted.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@struts.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@struts.apache.org

Re: Revolutions (was Re: Non-discussion emails)

[Ted Husted <te...@gmail.com>]

On 1/18/06, Martin Cooper <ma...@apache.org> wrote:
> I may be mistaken, but AFAIK, Ted is the only person advocating the use of
> Confluence. (Well, until you got here, that is. ;) He's certainly the one
> who keeps bringing it up. The rest of us are happy enough to stick to the
> wiki that the ASF has set up and supports.

Well, once upon a time, everyone was happy with CVS too. :)

I might be the only Struts committer who much cares about Confluence,
but there are many other ASF committers who would like us to add
Confluence to the mix one day.

Until then: Viva la Revolucion!

-Ted.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@struts.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@struts.apache.org

Re: Revolutions (was Re: Non-discussion emails)

[Martin Cooper <ma...@apache.org>]

On 1/18/06, Patrick Lightbody <fo...@opensymphony.com> wrote:
>
> Sure, that is the standard open source way. It usually works great.
>
> I'm just confused. I thought that everything had to be blessed, endorsed,
> and signed off by the gods/lawyers/infrastructure folks of Apache. If most
> of the people working on Struts Action prefer Confluence and JIRA, is there
> anything stopping us from asking Contegix to set them up?


I may be mistaken, but AFAIK, Ted is the only person advocating the use of
Confluence. (Well, until you got here, that is. ;) He's certainly the one
who keeps bringing it up. The rest of us are happy enough to stick to the
wiki that the ASF has set up and supports.

As for JIRA, there are a few who object on the basis that it's not open
source, while others would be happy to move to it. Personally, I'd be happy
to move to the ASF JIRA instance, but I'm not in favour of moving to a bug
tracking installation that's outside the ASF.

--
Martin Cooper


How about taking that further? What is stopping me from making a new forum
> (and mailing list) just for Action 2.0? Obviously I wouldn't do that, but
> since I'm new here I'd rather bring things up with the team than quickly
> fork off in to my own little world and, as you pointed out, potentially be
> missing important information.
>
> Patrick
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Posted via Jive Forums
>
> http://forums.opensymphony.com/thread.jspa?threadID=14842&messageID=29170#29170
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@struts.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@struts.apache.org
>
>

Re: Revolutions (was Re: Non-discussion emails)

[Ted Husted <te...@gmail.com>]

On 1/18/06, Patrick Lightbody <fo...@opensymphony.com> wrote:
> Sure, that is the standard open source way. It usually works great.
>
> I'm just confused. I thought that everything had to be blessed, endorsed, and signed off
> by the gods/lawyers/infrastructure folks of Apache. If most of the people working on
> Struts Action prefer Confluence and JIRA, is there anything stopping us from asking
> Contegix to set them up?

The ASF board wants us to keep "essential services" on ASF hardware,
so that the ASF assets on on ASF property. (It's a foundation thing.) 
Right now, "essential services" are defined as the repository, core
mailing lists, and main website. We also want everything in the
repository (including the website) to be under the ASF copyright.

Projects have maintained issue trackers at other locations before.
That's how we got JIRA in the first place. Projects were voting with
their feet, and eventually someone volunteered to setup our own JIRA
instance for all the projects to use. The trick is that the someone
who volunteers has to have earned sufficient merit with the
infrastructure team to be a credible volunteer.

If we do maintain a resource elsewhere, we are doing so in our
individual capacity, not as agents of the ASF. You'll note on the
external wiki site that we proclaim:

"This is an unofficial wiki site for projects hosted by the Apache
Software Foundation.

This site is not affiliated with the ASF. "

Unlike the content we check into the repository (including the
website), the external material is not automatically donated to the
ASF,  and so it is not property that the ASF would try to protect in
the event of IP litigation.

If we do setup external resources like this, it's polite to make them
available to the other ASF projects as well. Then, it's not about us
going our own way, it's about us staging a revolution so that Darwin
can decide.

At the ASF, the abiding principle is that "them that do the work make
the decisions". When infrastructure decisions are made, often they are
not made deliberately. They are made by someone on the infrastructure
team deciding that Moin-Moin would be easy to setup and maintain, and
then doing the work. AFAIK, the ASF Members never voted on Moin-Moin.
Someone just did it.


> How about taking that further? What is stopping me from making a new forum (and
> mailing list) just for Action 2.0? Obviously I wouldn't do that, but since I'm new here I'd
> rather bring things up with the team than quickly fork off in to my own little world and, as
> you pointed out, potentially be missing important information.

The same thing that stopped JGuru: Nothing.

* http://jguru.com/forums/Struts

But, old-school ASF committers are not going to make project decisions
on non-project resources. We *want* all of our decisions to be made on
the list, and archived in the ASF mailbox, so that they become a true
part of the project. When we (the PMC) do this, we are working as
agents of the ASF, and our decisions become the ASF's decisions, and
so we can be held harmless as individuals. Decisions we make offsite,
we make as individuals, and are not protected.

There's an old Apache rule-of-thumb that before we invite someone to
join us as a committer, we wait until they have made sustained and
significant contribution to the project for at least six consecutive
months. There's a couple of reasons for that, one of them is to be
sure that someone has hung around long enough to "get" what we are
doing.

There is a method to our madness, but sometimes it can take a few
months to sink in.

-Ted.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@struts.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@struts.apache.org

Re: Revolutions (was Re: Non-discussion emails)

[Patrick Lightbody <fo...@opensymphony.com>]

Sure, that is the standard open source way. It usually works great.

I'm just confused. I thought that everything had to be blessed, endorsed, and signed off by the gods/lawyers/infrastructure folks of Apache. If most of the people working on Struts Action prefer Confluence and JIRA, is there anything stopping us from asking Contegix to set them up? 

How about taking that further? What is stopping me from making a new forum (and mailing list) just for Action 2.0? Obviously I wouldn't do that, but since I'm new here I'd rather bring things up with the team than quickly fork off in to my own little world and, as you pointed out, potentially be missing important information.

Patrick
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted via Jive Forums
http://forums.opensymphony.com/thread.jspa?threadID=14842&messageID=29170#29170


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@struts.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@struts.apache.org