email template for maven evangelism

[Jorg Heymans <jh...@apache.org>]

Hi,

I'm gonna do a "mass" mailing on behalf of apache.org to the project
maintainers of dependencies that have not released the artifacts we
require to ibiblio.

1) any objections to this?
2) anything in particular i have left out or worded wrong in below
email? I know the process is a bit more trickier sometimes (eg we could
try and nudge them to do a release if we're depending on a revision
snapshot) but I purposely left that out because too complicated to explain.

--------------

Dear maintainer of <insert project name here>,

It has come to our attention that your library is currently being used
in a maven2 context by one or more projects from the Apache Software
Foundation.

For reasons of build stability and artifact availability it is
recommended that all library dependencies of our projects are uploaded
to the maven2 central repository at ibiblio [2]. As you can see, many
libraries are already represented there.

At the moment, following versions of your library have not yet been
uploaded to ibiblio:

<insert list of missing versions here>


The procedure of making your library availabe in the maven2 repository
is quite simple and described here [3]. Should you still require
assistance with this then the maven2 mailing list [4] should be your
first point of contact. In the unlikely event that you do not receive
any answers there you can always contact me directly on this email address.

We would be extremely grateful if you could repeat this process of
releasing to maven central for all future releases of your project.


Thanks in advance for making our project builds easier to manage!


On behalf of the Apache Software Foundation,
<insert your name here>


[1] http://maven.apache.org/
[2] http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2/
[3] http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-ibiblio-upload.html
[4] http://maven.apache.org/mail-lists.html

---------------

So far I collected following libraries (for cocoon):

xReporter   r672
nekodtd     0.1.11
chaperon    20040205
deli        x050330
jfor        0.7.1
hsqldb      1.8.0.2


Any others I should include ?



Jorg

Re: email template for maven evangelism

[Steve Loughran <st...@gmail.com>]

On 09/06/06, Noel J. Bergman <no...@devtech.com> wrote:
> Steve Loughran wrote:
>
> > I'd be pretty pissed off if I got this message.
>
> I'm harsher than you, and might be quite antagoized about even the prospect
> of cooperating.
>
> > Furthermore there are some of us who dont have any want or need for
> > maven and maven2. , but who do see the benefit in having a central
> > repository of OSS libraries.
>
> The repository must remain tool-agnostic.
>
> > So i'd position it in a way to emphasise the broad benefits of the
> > repository, something like:
>
> Better, but why should *they* be tasked with putting artifacts in the
> repository?  "Why don't you just do it if you want it?  I've got enough and
> better things to do, so why bother me with all of this repository stuff?"
>
> Arguably, we want to make sure that we have legit artifacts.  I'd make more
> of an effort to educate people about signing their artifacts and becoming
> part of a WoT, and pushing the repository tool authors on the issue.  Once
> again, it is entirely irresponsible to use unauthenticated artifacts.

In the forthcoming second edition of Java Development with Ant, I do
argue that being in the repository is a good citizenship thing, right
up there with being on gump. If you dont participate in the community,
you dont get the benefits.

Realistically, people will only publish to the repository if they see
value in doing so, and that only comes from using the repo themselves.

Re: email template for maven evangelism

[Steve Loughran <st...@gmail.com>]

On 09/06/06, Jorg Heymans <jh...@apache.org> wrote:
>
> Noel J. Bergman wrote:
>
> > You are asking them to do more work.  For what value?  You keep repeatedly
> > using the "maven" word, and don't seem to care that not everyone cares about
> > maven.  They already have users, and they didn't have to mess with maven to
> > get them.  If I were publishing a nice, simple, but useful utility jar, I
> > certainly would not be using maven.  And the only POM I'd be interested in
> > would be http://www.pomwonderful.com/, and it doesn't use XML.
>
> Right. But that's just you. Others might.


maybe. But in Java OSS citizenship terms there are two things right
now that unifiy projects

Apache Gump
Maven repositories

Maven2 has implicitly dropped of gump: you make m2 your build tool and
you drop off the nightly build of everything.

Its pretty hard to turn round and tell your dependencies that you now
want something from them to help you use the build tool you've chosen,
when that build tool doesnt benefit the rest of the community.

-steve

Re: email template for maven evangelism

[Jorg Heymans <jh...@apache.org>]

Noel J. Bergman wrote:

> You are asking them to do more work.  For what value?  You keep repeatedly
> using the "maven" word, and don't seem to care that not everyone cares about
> maven.  They already have users, and they didn't have to mess with maven to
> get them.  If I were publishing a nice, simple, but useful utility jar, I
> certainly would not be using maven.  And the only POM I'd be interested in
> would be http://www.pomwonderful.com/, and it doesn't use XML.

Right. But that's just you. Others might.

Anyway i'll leave the email idea for now.


Jorg

RE: email template for maven evangelism

["Noel J. Bergman" <no...@devtech.com>]

Jorg Heymans wrote:

> I'm assuming that the majority of OSS projects enjoys the fact that
> other people want to use their work. These projects go out of their
> way to get registered on sourceforge, freshmeat, theserverside etc,
> so why not assume that they would not mind putting in some effort to
> have their artifacts published on a central (maven) repository ?

You are asking them to do more work.  For what value?  You keep repeatedly
using the "maven" word, and don't seem to care that not everyone cares about
maven.  They already have users, and they didn't have to mess with maven to
get them.  If I were publishing a nice, simple, but useful utility jar, I
certainly would not be using maven.  And the only POM I'd be interested in
would be http://www.pomwonderful.com/, and it doesn't use XML.

	--- Noel

Re: email template for maven evangelism

[Jorg Heymans <jh...@apache.org>]

Noel J. Bergman wrote:

>> So i'd position it in a way to emphasise the broad benefits of the
>> repository, something like:
> 
> Better, but why should *they* be tasked with putting artifacts in the
> repository?  "Why don't you just do it if you want it?  I've got enough and
> better things to do, so why bother me with all of this repository stuff?"

I'm assuming that the majority of OSS projects enjoys the fact that
other people want to use their work. These projects go out of their way
to get registered on sourceforge, freshmeat, theserverside etc, so why
not assume that they would not mind putting in some effort to have their
artifacts published on a central (maven) repository ?


> If it is going to go out over the ASF brand, it had better be vetted and
> voted on, and should be approved by the PRC.

The asf brand thingy was a suggestion, doesn't need to be.


Jorg

RE: email template for maven evangelism

["Noel J. Bergman" <no...@devtech.com>]

Steve Loughran wrote:

> I'd be pretty pissed off if I got this message.

I'm harsher than you, and might be quite antagoized about even the prospect
of cooperating.

> Furthermore there are some of us who dont have any want or need for
> maven and maven2. , but who do see the benefit in having a central
> repository of OSS libraries.

The repository must remain tool-agnostic.

> So i'd position it in a way to emphasise the broad benefits of the
> repository, something like:

Better, but why should *they* be tasked with putting artifacts in the
repository?  "Why don't you just do it if you want it?  I've got enough and
better things to do, so why bother me with all of this repository stuff?"

Arguably, we want to make sure that we have legit artifacts.  I'd make more
of an effort to educate people about signing their artifacts and becoming
part of a WoT, and pushing the repository tool authors on the issue.  Once
again, it is entirely irresponsible to use unauthenticated artifacts.

> your name here,
> Apache repository team.

If it is going to go out over the ASF brand, it had better be vetted and
voted on, and should be approved by the PRC.

	--- Noel

Re: email template for maven evangelism

[Steve Loughran <st...@gmail.com>]

On 09/06/06, Jorg Heymans <jh...@apache.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm gonna do a "mass" mailing on behalf of apache.org to the project
> maintainers of dependencies that have not released the artifacts we
> require to ibiblio.
>
> 1) any objections to this?
> 2) anything in particular i have left out or worded wrong in below
> email? I know the process is a bit more trickier sometimes (eg we could
> try and nudge them to do a release if we're depending on a revision
> snapshot) but I purposely left that out because too complicated to explain.
>
> --------------
>
> Dear maintainer of <insert project name here>,
>
> It has come to our attention that your library is currently being used
> in a maven2 context by one or more projects from the Apache Software
> Foundation.

>
> For reasons of build stability and artifact availability it is
> recommended that all library dependencies of our projects are uploaded
> to the maven2 central repository at ibiblio [2]. As you can see, many
> libraries are already represented there.
>
> At the moment, following versions of your library have not yet been
> uploaded to ibiblio:
>
> <insert list of missing versions here>
>
>
> The procedure of making your library availabe in the maven2 repository
> is quite simple and described here [3]. Should you still require
> assistance with this then the maven2 mailing list [4] should be your
> first point of contact. In the unlikely event that you do not receive
> any answers there you can always contact me directly on this email address.
>
> We would be extremely grateful if you could repeat this process of
> releasing to maven central for all future releases of your project.


> [1] http://maven.apache.org/
> [2] http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2/
> [3] http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-ibiblio-upload.html
> [4] http://maven.apache.org/mail-lists.html
>
> ---------------
>


The message effectively says "please make it easier for me to build my
program by doing some work for me". That doesn't offer any benefits
for the team at the expense of learning and effort. I'd be pretty
pissed off if I got this message. It'd be like getting an email from,
say, the suse team telling me that I had to produce RPM packages of my
code as part of the relase process, a message that would create a
response like "if you want it, go do it yourself". After all, we leave
the jpackage people to do exactly that.

Furthermore there are some of us who dont have any want or need for
maven and maven2. , but who do see the benefit in having a central
repository of OSS libraries.

So i'd position it in a way to emphasise the broad benefits of the
repository, something like:

The Maven and Maven2 repositories (http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2/) are
the de-facto standard repository for sharing open source libraries
(and related artifacts, such as source and javadocs) amongst open
source projects. Although written for those tools, the repository is
usable in other products, including
 -Maven2's Ant tasks
 -Ivy Ant tasks to retrieve artifacts using Ivy's own descriptors
 -Ant 1.7's fetch.xml library fetcher script which can pull down artifacts.
 -SmartFrog's library artifact component for downloading and executing JARs.
As such, the repository has moved from just becoming something for a
few tools to a central place to share data, used at runtime as well as
compile time.

At the moment, your project's artifacts are not in the repository. We
think it would be good for the OSS community, and users of your
libraries, if they were. This doesnt' mean that we want to change your
build process to using maven/maven2, only that we'd like you to make
uploading artifacts to the central repository part of its release
process.

If you are interested in doing this, we can help you in the following ways

->maven artifact lists
->point to documents that are show how to release from Ant.
->offer personal hand-holding during the introductory process

We want to help you to join the repository, as your libraries are
valued parts of the OSS toolset, and we want to make them easier to be
distributed. As well as the mailing lists, I can be contacted
personally at *example*@apache.org, or on jabber at
*example*@gmail.com

If you are interested in finding more about the repository internals,
you can join the repository mailing list, repository@apache.org, or
look at the layout document -
http://docs.codehaus.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=22230

your name here,
Apache repository team.

Re: email template for maven evangelism

[Jorg Heymans <jh...@apache.org>]

Carlos Sanchez wrote:
> The thing is that you probably need to provide the pom.xml to them. If
> they are not familiar with Maven 2 they won't know what to put there
> and the projects using it at apache will have better understanding.
> 


There is an example of that in the maven evangelism link. The idea is
not just to get the releases on ibiblio but also (and i admit this is
very idealistic and naive) to try and get them to educate themselves a
bit on maven. IMO the longer the email the less likely people will read
it to the end or react to it.


Jorg

RE: email template for maven evangelism

["Noel J. Bergman" <no...@devtech.com>]

Jorg Heymans wrote:

> Noel J. Bergman wrote:
> > And many of them may not give a farthing about Maven, so they will
consider
> > your e-mail to be spam.
> I was aware of that yes. What do you think about Steve's wording then?

I replied to him a few minutes ago.  It is better.  But we still have some
work to do on promoting the idea of a repository (not Maven or any
particular tool, else you alienate users of other tools).  And there are
more critical issues, such as signing the artificts.  If an author is in the
WoT, signs the artifacts and allows you to do the grunt work of publishing
the artifacts in a repository, that would better than if the author were to
put unsigned artifacts in the repository.

> they perhaps should start thinking about being present or not on maven
central.

Keep calling it maven central, and you'll lose a lot of people.

	--- Noel

Re: email template for maven evangelism

[Jorg Heymans <jh...@apache.org>]

Noel J. Bergman wrote:

> 
> And many of them may not give a farthing about Maven, so they will consider
> your e-mail to be spam.
> 

I was aware of that yes. What do you think about Steve's wording then?
It is much more subtle, could make library owners realize that they
perhaps should start thinking about being present or not on maven central.


Jorg

RE: email template for maven evangelism

["Noel J. Bergman" <no...@devtech.com>]

> The thing is that you probably need to provide the pom.xml to them. If
> they are not familiar with Maven 2 they won't know what to put there

And many of them may not give a farthing about Maven, so they will consider
your e-mail to be spam.

	--- Noel

Re: email template for maven evangelism

[Carlos Sanchez <ca...@apache.org>]

The thing is that you probably need to provide the pom.xml to them. If
they are not familiar with Maven 2 they won't know what to put there
and the projects using it at apache will have better understanding.

On 6/9/06, Jorg Heymans <jh...@apache.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm gonna do a "mass" mailing on behalf of apache.org to the project
> maintainers of dependencies that have not released the artifacts we
> require to ibiblio.
>
> 1) any objections to this?
> 2) anything in particular i have left out or worded wrong in below
> email? I know the process is a bit more trickier sometimes (eg we could
> try and nudge them to do a release if we're depending on a revision
> snapshot) but I purposely left that out because too complicated to explain.
>
> --------------
>
> Dear maintainer of <insert project name here>,
>
> It has come to our attention that your library is currently being used
> in a maven2 context by one or more projects from the Apache Software
> Foundation.
>
> For reasons of build stability and artifact availability it is
> recommended that all library dependencies of our projects are uploaded
> to the maven2 central repository at ibiblio [2]. As you can see, many
> libraries are already represented there.
>
> At the moment, following versions of your library have not yet been
> uploaded to ibiblio:
>
> <insert list of missing versions here>
>
>
> The procedure of making your library availabe in the maven2 repository
> is quite simple and described here [3]. Should you still require
> assistance with this then the maven2 mailing list [4] should be your
> first point of contact. In the unlikely event that you do not receive
> any answers there you can always contact me directly on this email address.
>
> We would be extremely grateful if you could repeat this process of
> releasing to maven central for all future releases of your project.
>
>
> Thanks in advance for making our project builds easier to manage!
>
>
> On behalf of the Apache Software Foundation,
> <insert your name here>
>
>
> [1] http://maven.apache.org/
> [2] http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2/
> [3] http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-ibiblio-upload.html
> [4] http://maven.apache.org/mail-lists.html
>
> ---------------
>
> So far I collected following libraries (for cocoon):
>
> xReporter   r672
> nekodtd     0.1.11
> chaperon    20040205
> deli        x050330
> jfor        0.7.1
> hsqldb      1.8.0.2
>
>
> Any others I should include ?
>
>
>
> Jorg
>


-- 
I could give you my word as a Spaniard.
No good. I've known too many Spaniards.
                             -- The Princess Bride