Craig L Russell wrote: > > On Aug 19, 2009, at 12:23 AM, ant elder wrote: >> >> +1. And i'd go further and say while the ASF does not have a clear >> policy on something that is an ASF issue then the IPMC should not be >> trying to make up our own, and, we should be trying to shield >> poddlings from these ambiguities. > > I'd go exactly the other direction. > > The fact that policy has "should" instead of "must" tells me that best > practice is to do the "should" but for historical reasons, it's not a > requirement. Historically some PMCs have not done the "should" and we > can't go back and change history, but going forward, projects "should" > comply. > > The incubator should be the place where "should" becomes "must" so as to > align newcomers to Apache with best practice. If there's some very good > reason for a podling to eschew best practice, then let's hear it.
Exactly. The incubator enforces Best Practices even when these are poorly documented or incomplete, and discusses why they should be normalized. Quit looking at the exceptions; "but the Poo project does it this way!"; because Poo might have it wrong, but the board isn't compelled at this time to fix it because the fix might do more harm than good. In the meantime, we have dozens of projects who are here to learn the *right* way to build code and communities in collaborative, meritocratic manner that survives competitors working together on the same code, and from the mistakes of other projects. E.g. it is the board's opinion that @author tags harm the evolution of software, adding individual 'ownership' to pieces of code which are the project's now. Exceptions were granted to not disrupt *existing* ASF projects; there was no exception granted for incoming projects. This is why mentoring is an active, not a passive task. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
