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Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 02:26:39 +0100
From: Ross Gardler <rgardler@apache.org>
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To: general@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: an experiment
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On 17/08/2010 02:05, Greg Stein wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 16:47, Noel J. Bergman<noel@devtech.com>  wrote:

...

> Your head is in the sand. The Incubator is a broken process. Everybody
> hates it. Everybody wants to get out of it. Subversion was fortunate
> in that we had enough support to bully our way through, to route
> around damage, and to check everything off the list rapidly. Whoever
> said it before: if we *didn't* have that fortunate fact behind us,
> then our approach to the ASF would have been very very different.

I have to agree. I am currently working with a very large project that 
is interested in coming into the incubator. There are two major issues 
for me to address:

One is getting the lawyers from the originating company to agree to the 
legal sign-off - nothing new there.

The other is getting the project through the incubator in a reasonable 
time so that its large number of users don't get the jitters and switch 
to an alternative platform.

The project genuinely tries to operate in an ASF like manner but has 
some inherent problems that are rooted in the fact that 75%+ of 
committers all being part of a single company and all lacking experience 
of ASF style development models. Consequently, some working practices 
will need to be changed, but the committers are aware of the changes 
required and willing to do the work.

Unlike Subversion there are no pre-existing members on the commit list 
and thus noone to shelter the project team from the peanut gallery here 
in general@.

I've already decided that I'm going to have to recruit a number of key 
mentors to help me protect the project during incubation.

For some reason that never occurred to me as being kind of anti-apache. 
Aren't we a flat organisation? It really shouldn't matter who the 
mentors are as long as they are members, yet I had subconsciously 
decided that it did matter.

For this reason I have to agree that the Incubator process is not coping 
well with the large numbers of interested bystanders we have on the 
IPMC. Oversight is good, but we don't need the oversight of the peanut 
gallery.

Kudos to those trying to solve this problem without completely breaking 
up an otherwise healthy incubation process.

Ross

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