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From: Craig L Russell <craig.russell@oracle.com>
To: general@incubator.apache.org
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Subject: Re: Earned autonomy
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Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2012 09:14:11 -0800
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On Feb 6, 2012, at 8:23 AM, Marvin Humphrey wrote:

> Hi, Ate,
>
> On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 02:33:11AM +0100, Ate Douma wrote:
>> What worries me a lot about the recent proposals, not only the text
>> above, is that project autonomy seems to be measured foremost by just
>> doing proper releases.
>>
>> To me, Apache == Community over code.
>
> The case I have been trying to make is that there are community  
> benefits when
> a podling is allowed to earn progressively increasing autonomy over  
> its
> releases.

To me, this increasing autonomy can be handled today if the Mentors  
step up.

The first release should be vetted by each of the three Mentors,  
before it even gets to the full IPMC membership. If the Mentors do the  
minimum of checking signatures, looking over the RAT report, they can  
then rely on the PPMC members to technically vet the release.

And the second time around, reviewing a release should take even less  
time. And once the Mentors have confidence in the ability of the PPMC  
members to properly review, they can choose to vote +1 on a release  
with confidence that the release satisfies the requirements. Thus, a  
Mentor can give more autonomy simply by voting.

>
> For what it's worth, the poor state of the Incubator release system  
> has had
> negative impact on our podling's ability to recruit and retain new
> contributors.  When you're accustomed to the instantaneous  
> gratification of
> releasing to Github, CPAN, or RubyGems.org, coming into the  
> Incubator and
> seeing that it is routine for release candidates to be delayed for  
> *weeks*
> awaiting three IPMC votes is shocking.

The delay is shocking. Why can't the Mentors check signatures and  
review RAT?

There is no requirement by the incubator that a release actually do  
anything useful. So to sign off on a release should be a 30 minute  
task. We know that Mentors need to pay attention to the community  
interactions, which is where I expect most of their time to be spent.  
Reviewing a release for proper licensing and signatures should be a  
tiny part of the job.

Craig
>
> If you were trying to pick which open source project to spend your  
> time on,
> why would you want to stick around an organization that has so much  
> trouble
> getting its act together?
>
> Marvin Humphrey
>
>
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