On Friday, Sep 19, 2003, at 10:08 Europe/Rome, Jochen Wiedmann wrote:
Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
Even if all Jakarta projects get top-level (which I doubt), Jakarta as a community can still remain. It is a place where Java developers can get together on common issues. Jakarta doesn't have to dite, it just needs to find it's own correct space, more about coordination ang getting together rather than being held accountable for a miriad of projects that it cannot possibly keep track of.
No doubt. But do you think, the same community could be *established* between, say, alexandria.apache.org, bcel.apache.org, bsf.apache.org, cactus.apache.org, ...?
I know, I am exaggerating. Just for illustration. But: My impression is
written on the emails on this list, which I have read in the past few days.
About four or five new proposals, each of them expressing their wish "to
become a TLP". Today eight or ten current subprojects proposed for TLP.
Jochen,
you (and many others, I'm sure) probably don't know that the "flat the foundation" campaign went on inside the ASF for at least three years before the ASF could find consensus on what it was good to do.
When jakarta was created, there was a strong intuition that what you are saying above was right. To put it simply: "a project is like a family and it's easier to educate people in a family".
As long as jakarta was the only one and contained a few efforts (tomcat, ant and a few moved from the deprecated-for-legal-issues java.apache.org) there were no problems.
Then came xml.apache.org and things started to get messy. The first XML PMC was a political one, homesteaded by the donations of companies that wanted to jump on the bandwagon. It looked way to corporate. I was part of it and I reported signs to the members.
At that point, a division inside the ASF started to happen: the members coming from the HTTP/APR world thought that PMCs were great and were working just fine, the members (a great minority at that time) coming from jakarta/xml, suggested PMC to be useless beurocratic things that shielded people from understanding what the foundation was.
The 'flat the foundation' campaign started but received *strong* opposition from the board for at least 2 years.
The board believed that "project containment" was a good thing and that eventual problems were due to human issues, they were not structural.
The 'flatters', on the other hand, pointed out that the problem was structural: a PMC works best when it is composed by people that care about the project and a project must have the fewer number of efforts possible.
A few things started to change the picture:
1) Gump
2) Problems in the Avalon community that the jakarta PMC was unaware of (there was not Avalon representation in that PMC at that time)
3) Problems in project-inflicted categorization
Let me go thru all of them:
1) Gump shows that dependencies between the various ASF projects don't increase "inside the container project". This showed, pretty evidently, that the assumption that "projects in the same container cooperate better", it's totally and utterly false. In fact, there has been much more cooperation between xml and jakarta than between jakarta itself.
2) The jakarta PMC failed to identify problems in the avalon community. Jakarta showed three level of containment as efforts such as Avalon and Turbine started to build their own sub-sub-projects inhouse in order to avoid having to go thru the PMC. If there is no legal oversight, the foundation is in danger.
Following the HTTPD/APR history (where PMC were reported to work just fine), the flatters suggested to help promoting the concept that a PMC should be composed by committers of a particular codebase, or a collection of codebases highly intercommunicating.
3) the other problem is that, just like all librarians know: categorization is politics. What is good for you, cannot be good for me. Jakarta categorizes for programming language, XML for data syntax, WS for marketing scope. Cocoon fits in all of them... choosing which one becomes a political issue. A political issue which is useless and utterly energy wasteful.
- o -
The result of 3 years of debate is the following consensus:
1) each community should be allowed to escape the trap of umbrella containment and acquire their top level domain, if they want so
2) the foundation will promote this but will not inflict it upon communities
3) each PMC chair will be the link between the foundation and the project. the foundation wants projects to be as self-sufficient as possible, to allow scalability of the entire foundation, without loosing legal and community oversight. [note: PMC chairs are *NOT* part of the board, they are not even required to be ASF members]
4) categorization should not be done by location, but by projects exhibiting metadata that is later used to present a software map of the foundation. [Needless to say, this software map has not been implemented]
- o -
As I understand and resonate with your concerns as a user, I believe that Noel is completely right in indicating that there are different issues on the table:
1) usability of the foundation information infrastructure
2) structure of the foundation itself
Nobody ever suggested that 1) should be a direct mapping of 2) even if, historically, this has been the case.
Great efforts have been made by the foundation to improve our infrastructue and our ability to cope with new service needs. Work is undergoing. Progess (due to lazyness, inertia, need for high availability) is slow, but steady.
Believe me when I say that your concerns are well visible in the ASF mind, but also, please understand that there are also important reasons to change the structure of the foundation itself and impact on users (at least initially) is a price that we are willing to pay in order to have a more scalable and more legally safe foundation.
HTH
-- Stefano.
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