(this is a rant and the beginnings of a proposal which has nothing to do
in particular with James, ActiveMQ, or its release)
On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 01:11:35PM +0100, James Strachan wrote:
> In accordance with the incubator release procedure (see below) the
> ActiveMQ community has voted on and approved the 4.0 release binary.
>
> We would now like to request the permission of the Incubator PMC to
> perform the release.
Everytime I read something like this I get terribly annoyed. People are
doing stuff, trying to comply with all kinds of policies, and then instead
of self-governing they have to go ask permission. Its wrong. Permission is
something kids ask their parents for. When you need to ask for it, you're
not self-governing. If we're to have self-governing communities we need to
have them be like that while incubating. Self-governance is grown, not
"bolted on" after graduation.
What is also entirely stupid is that seemingly a significant amount of the
time, there actually is something that has to change before the incubator
PMC will actually "give permission". This is probably why we got started
down the road in the first place, eg it might be somehow the "cause" for
what IMHO is a bad policy.
Ok, how do I turn my annoyance into an itch to scratch? Is there some way
to actually alleviate the real problems?
There must be. All these little rules and policies and practices (written
or unwritten) seem like they could be somehow codified. Lets do so.
Let's write a piece of software to do the auditing for us. Let's write it
in java as a commandline tool spitting out a choice of text-based or
XML-based reports. Let's wrap the tool in an ant task, and in a maven2
plugin. People and projects can start using the tool without us changing
any of the process, and once it works well enough these kinds of "permission
emails" will all become the pure formalities they should be ("please approve
that you trust that I used the tool correctly and that the tool can also be
trusted, btw here is the output"), and we can even start thinking about
changing this @#$^&% process!
Questions:
* anyone think it can't work? Anyone think its a good idea?
* where's the sandbox where we can work on this thing together?
(I'm quite willing to mentor a new incubation podling :-))
* who is willing to spend a day of their ApacheCon EU hackathon working on
this?
LSD
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