Hi Dims,

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Davanum Srinivas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Sorry...Need to take this off my chest before the official VOTE.

Thanks for this.

> ...Looking at the maven repo thread, begs the question. Do we really need
> an incubator?
>
> Isn't it just a IP Clearance SVN now once people have their way with
> no distinction at all between incubator and non-incubator code?...

It took me a few seconds to understand your concern, I had never
thought about it like that before.

I don't think putting incubator artifacts in the main Maven repository
removes all distinction between incubator and non-incubator code. If
we require incubator artifacts to have "-incubating" in their version
names, that's perfectly clear.

Such a dependency might be made somewhat invisible by transitive
dependencies on incubating projects, but the problem is exactly the
same if a non-incubating project depends on GPL stuff transitively.
That's a Maven problem, not an incubator problem.

Currently, one has to explicitely check their complete dependency tree
to sure about what their code uses, when working with Maven. Or use
private repositories exclusively, with controlled addition of
artifacts. That's not in any way an incubator problem.

To answer your question, to me the value of the incubator is as much
in creating communities as in creating clean code. Having been a
mentor of Wicket, I think this is a perfect example of a community
that already worked quite well, but needed some mentoring to ease into
the Apache way, and I think the results were very successful.

Other projects don't incubate as well, especially now that the
incubator has grown larger with relatively few people (IMHO) taking
care of the health of the incubator at large.

To me this means that a few things need to be fixed in the incubator -
like reducing bureaucracy to a minimum while avoiding losing track of
incubating projects, making docs more consistent and minimalistic, and
making sure companies do not hijack their way into the ASF via the
incubator.

That doesn't mean we don't need an incubator, quite the contrary in my
opinion: we need a stronger and more fun incubator.

-Bertrand

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