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From: Leo Simons <mail@leosimons.com>
Subject: Re: making project decisions with a small number of PMC members
Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 10:16:13 +0200
To: general@incubator.apache.org

On May 15, 2007, at 12:26 AM, Brett Porter wrote:
> Quick question (I hope). I was thinking about what will happen if the
> NMaven podling would like to add a committer, make a release, etc.
>
> Would votes by Maven PMC members (As the sponsoring project) be
> considered binding in this case, or should we have IPMC members?

No the sponsoring PMC votes are not binding. It should be the IPMC.

> We currently only have 2 IPMC members on the project, so I was going
> to ask for an additional mentor anyway, but I feel like the
> appropriate people to be casting votes should be Maven PMC folk.
>
> Thoughts?

I share your feeling. I'm afraid it is not so easy to change.

  * ASF is structured to have a PMC (or Officer) responsible and
    accontable for most things
  * ASF is not structured for multiple PMCs or Officers to share
    responsibility

Changing this is a lot of work (for example it screws up the workflow  
for infrastructure since it becomes much harder to know if a request  
came with the right authority), so I've always shunned away from it.

As to which PMC *should* be responsible for *what*, "it depends".  
We've seen projects were it was really needed for the Incubator PMC  
to take the responsibility for a TLP-sponsored podling, and then some  
projects where the IPMC was hardly ever needed at all.

(aside: some of the original designs for the incubator introduced the  
"PPMC" that would consist of
   * incubator PMC
   * sponsoring PMC
   * all committers on the new project
   * all mentors of the project
where the goal would sort-of be to have the committers make the  
actual decisions and then the IPMC and sponsoring PMC would  
reluctantly fill in the gaps. We had to move away from that because  
it broke the "clear accountability" chain; Secondly, a lot of  
sponsoring PMC members and IPMC members didn't want to be on that  
many mailing lists.

So now we have a PPMC which is really just the committers on the  
project with their mentors, and it's supposedly no longer allowed to  
make any real decisions. Not so great a situation either.)

/LSD


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