Using JIRA

[Cliff Schmidt <cl...@gmail.com>]

I just wanted to remind everyone that JIRA is all set up and ready to
be used.  See: http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XAP.

The xap-developers group already has the following members:
Atsuko Pien (apien)
Cliff Schmidt (cliffs)
Coach Wei (cwei)
Igor Kaplansky (kaplansky)
James Margaris (jmargaris)
Peter Eacmen (eacmen)

These people in this group can assign and resolve issues.  However,
anyone with a JIRA account (which is very simple to set up) can create
new JIRA issues or comment on existing ones (or close ones that you
opened).

So, I'd suggest we start trying to use JIRA and see how it goes; it
can be quite helpful.  There is one case, where I would suggest we
*require* the use of JIRA: any contributions from non-committers
should come in through JIRA patches.  Not all projects work this way;
some accept patches to the dev mailing list.  However, it helps when
someone wants to attach something that the mailing list might reject.
It also forces the person attaching the patch to click that they agree
to the standard Apache License terms, which is a nice thing to have
people do who haven't signed a CLA.

So, there's nothing in any written or unwritten rule around Apache
that says you have to use JIRA, but it's probably a good idea, and
this might be the right time to start trying it out and establishing a
process that works for this project.

Cliff