Mailing-List: contact oro-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Message-Id: <200308121801.h7CI1bNR008802@gandalf.savarese.org>
To: pmc@jakarta.apache.org
cc: oro-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: jakarta-oro dilemma
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Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 14:01:37 -0400
From: "Daniel F. Savarese" <dfs@savarese.org>


Dear Jakarta PMC,

We've got a problem over in jakarta-oro that we need the PMC to help fix.
We no longer have a quorum of active committers to vote on things.
But we do have active contributors and plenty of active users.  We
need to get our 2.0.8 release out the door and have been fudging the
voting rules for a couple of previous releases, by counting votes from
two active contributors who aren't committers, in addition to my vote
(an active committer) and Jon Steven's vote (who is a committer, but
not active).  This can't go on any longer because it's just not correct
procedure.  We'd like to vote two active contributors in as committers,
but for obvious reasons we can't.  Therefore, we need the PMC to step
in and help.

There are several, not necessarily mutually exclusive, possibilities:
  1. PMC evaluates situation and votes in two committers, restoring the
     necessary quorum.
  2. PMC takes over voting responsibility for releases, which I believe
     is the long term goal for all Jakarta projects.  In this case, I'd
     request to be added to/voted onto the PMC because I'm a former PMC
     member and someone from the project should be around to initiate
     votes.
  3. Project is opened up to all Jakarta committers and those interested
     subscribe to dev mailing list and participate in votes.
  4. Make jakarta-regexp committers jakarta-oro committers and vice versa,
     as I believe jakarta-regexp is in a similar situation to jakarta-oro.
     Whether or not the two projects would merge would be decided later,
     but participants of each could take an active role in helping the
     other project along.
  5. A call for participation is made to general@jakarta and any already
     existing Jakarta committer willing to contribute some time to the
     project is automatically made a committer for the project.

I'm sure there are additional alternatives.  I'm happy with any of the
above.

Specifically, we've been wanting to vote on
Takashi Okamoto <tokamoto at rd.nttdata.co.jp> and
Mark Murphy <markm at tyrell.com>
as committers, because of the significant code contributions they
have made and their continued active participation in development
discussions.

As a side note, the project has been hindered by its advanced
stage of development when initially imported as a Jakarta project
(no itches to scratch), initial reluctance to vote in committers
because of SVN always being on the horizon and my (mis)perception that
the ASF wanted to limit the creation of new committer accounts, and more
recently, the J2SE 1.4 javax.regex package.  However, there is still a
role for jakarta-oro to play in the Java and Jakarta ecosystems, but we
have to break the project out of it's current doldrums.  The problems
that developed with jakarta-oro did not arise with commons-net because
I took a back seat and forced the user community to take the lead and
become the development community before it entered the commons-sandbox
and then commons proper.  In other words, commons-net is healthy and
will survive without my participation, but I'm afraid the same isn't
the case with jakarta-oro and we need to get it to that point.  As I
mentioned above, jakarta-regexp is also in a paralyzed state, with only
one truly active committer, preventing release votes.  So in considering
jakarta-oro, jakarta-regexp should also be considered.

thanks,
daniel