On Aug 4, 2009, at 2:10 AM, Jukka Zitting wrote:
Hi,
On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:10 AM, Bertrand
Delacretaz<bdelacre...@apache.org> wrote:
In such a case, the key point is, do the people who write the code
listen to the community?
That's certainly good, but IMHO not really the key point as it doesn't
address the case when those people lose interest. A community that
actually writes the code is much stronger than one that just helps key
committers do that job.
The River and PDFBox podlings that I'm currently mentoring are good
examples of projects where community input was valued and taken into
account by the key committers, but when they no longer had
time/interest the projects essentially stopped as there was nobody to
continue the work. PDFBox seems to have overcome that problem now and
River is showing some positive signs, but both cases have required
(and still require) quite a bit of mentoring to get them going again.
Besides all the other good things diversity brings it's also an
insurance policy for the project, and that's what I think the
Incubator should be looking for as a graduation criteria.
You are trying to predict the future. Good luck with that.
The rules are there because we have a belief that meeting them will
give the project the best chance to succeed. I would argue that if
this is your measure you should take a look at Logback and SLF4J. The
number of people who have commit rights is very small (essentially 1
in the case of Logback). But Ceki is a recognized expert in the field
and is passionate about logging. The odds of his abandoning the
project are about equal to that of him getting hit by a truck. But
there are severl active participants in the projects (myself included)
and many more who stop by and ask questions.
Using these projects as an example is perhaps not the best from a
community perspective because Ceki has no intention of running them
like Apache projects. But even if he did, by these standards the
projects might never make it out of the incubator. Even if those of us
who would like them had commit rights I can guarantee that 95% of the
commits would still be Ceki's.
From my perspective we should be evaluating projects based on whether
they are building a healthy Apache community where we have sufficient
belief that the project will be able to sustain itself without further
mentoring. IMO, trying to factor in "what ifs" about what will happen
if certain committers leave, unless they have shown signs that that is
likely, is not a very good indicator of success. Over the course of
time a project is in the incubator I would expect that mentors to have
a good sense of what the level of commitment is and would use that as
part of their recommendation for graduation.
Ralph
