On Feb 14, 2007, at 7:02 AM, Yoav Shapira wrote:
Hi, This is a bit of an unusual case and I'm not sure how to vote. Stuff that makes me worry about log4net: - The community seems to be shrinking, not growing, even though past status reports have made it a top point to expand the community. - There has been no release in almost a year, since 1.2.10 in March 2006, even though several status reports say a bug fix release is forthcoming. Stuff that makes me feel good: - All code cleared legally - All code ASL-licensed - Good interaction with its sponsoring TLP (Logging Services) - Vote for acceptance by the sponsoring TLP My specific concern is with the Incubator exit criterion of ""The project is not highly dependent on any single contributor (there's at least 3 legally independent committers and there is no single company or entity that is vital to the success of the project)". The project doesn't meet that criterion now, does it?
Growing committers for an mature project is hard when most users are generally satisfied and most contributions are single-shot patches to address a users' particular interest. The number of users submitting patches in the last year on JIRA indicates that the code is accessible enough that many users can contribute, though I could not identify any individual that had a pattern of contributions particularly addressing the concerns of others.
The overall community appears stable from reviewing the message counts on log4net-dev and log4net-user over the last several years. Maybe a slight decline, but not a drop off a cliff.
I do not believe any single company or entity is vital to the success of the project. I believe the project has achieved its overall objectives and is already a success. I do not believe that the project is highly dependent on any single contributor. Loss of all the current active committers would not be desirable and would impact future maintenance releases, but would not be anywhere as fatal to the project as a minor loss during of a project in a construction or stabilization phase.
The project does meet the 3 legally independent committers criteria as long if you are generous with the recentness of the last commit or the nature of their changes. Nicko Cadell and Ron Grabowski clearly satisfy the first two slots as active committers with no legal relationship. Then there is the debatable 3rd committer:
Niall Daley: last commit 2005-12-16, last log4net-dev posting 2007-02-11. Partner in same firm as Nicko.
Gert Driesen: last commit 2005-12-11, last log4net-dev posting 2006-03-09. Not aware of any legal relationship. Gert is an active NAnt committer and I have requested that he make a statement regarding his log4net involvement.
Curt Arnold, last commit 2007-02-09, last log4net-dev posting 2007-02-14. Logging PMC chair. Have used and submitted patches against log4net in a previous lifetime (prior to log4net's migration to ASF) but have only monitored log4net and made a trivial commit recently.
There are a couple of manipulative ways of dressing up the situation. I could fire up my .NET development environment and knock off a few patches or work up an Ant build to prove my log4net-foo or Gert could do the same to show that he is still engaged in the project or commit privileges could be granted a contributor who has submitted a decent patch but has established history. I don't think any of these would actually benefit the project.
The release issue is a bit of chicken and egg. A pending graduation would postpone preparation of a release (ahem, development snapshot) since you'd prefer to have graduation first then a release following with all the incubator disclaimers removed. If that is the blocker, then the log4net-dev team could produce a release candidate with the incubator disclaimers removed, accept it on their dev list, inform the [EMAIL PROTECTED] and request another vote, and if successful request the Logging Services PMC to approve the release.
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