Sorry for the late replies on this folks. I've been away for my $dayjob at Citrix. Let me try to see if I can make clear what I see as objections/questions/understandings and address them one by one. If I got them wrong, let me know and please clarify what you're asking.
@Sebastien > Why don't Citrix developers show us how they would do it in the open ? Right > now it's all hidden. I take this to indicate that there's a misunderstanding that this is a Citrix policy that the Citrix developers are following currently in secret and we're trying to ask the community to follow as well. The fact is Citrix has no such policy currently and I'm trying to get Citrix management to agree to this checkin policy because of how poorly the previous releases have been going as well. I proposed this mainly because I see that because the project is so broad in scope that without a CI system to give people a fundamental comfort that they didn't break anything, it will be very difficult for the project to move forward. If Citrix developers were doing this before, we wouldn't have seen some of the reverts and large number of RCs in current and previous releases. @Chip and @Hugo > Correct, and my statement stands. I'm -1 on any policy within the project > that enforces the use of a single company's resources if they are only > controlled by that company. Let's see how we can move this to the ASF (and > tweak / tune based on a better understanding of usage) before considering > it a project "policy". I think that's fair. And if anything in this proposal that I worried about, this is it. The problem for me is we haven't gotten there for ASF infra in two years and I'm worried that given the problems we're seeing with 4.4, we will lose momentum if we simply wait. I'm perfectly fine with exploring ways to find a middle ground. For example, if Citrix is to open the infrastructure to community (I would need to find some way to convince Citrix), is that acceptable? Opening it to the public would still mean the on-going cost is provided by Citrix so it's not truly independent of Citrix. I'm open to any suggestions to move us forward faster here. @Hugo > Anyway part of being a committer is the responsibility to make a correct > decision when and how to commit to the central code base, this includes > deciding when running automation tests is appropriate. You know i’m in favor > of quality controls and i am a strong proponent of testing before committing, > but each committer has his own responsibility in this and has to show he/she > takes this seriously. While I do trust the committers to be responsible (which is what I gather from the above quote), the problem is that the project is too broad and deep. Just being responsible is not enough to ensure that quality is not adversely affected. As a committer, I rather give up a bit of my liberties than to see the community produce poor quality releases. That's why I made this proposal. BTW, I especially apologize for the late reply on this email. I think your email illustrated Sebastien and Chip's points as well but it came in to my inbox really late due to the mailing list problems so it was buried under a bunch of other emails. Let me know what we can do, particularly on the how we can make this an independent process quickly. --Alex
