Hi, having just published a release of Apache RAT with the "-incubating" label, I'd though it is time to discuss the future of RAT. RAT is an incubator project since 18 months. It is not an overly busy project: The occasional feature request, which is handled, a bug report from time to time, and so on. OTOH, it definitely lives: People are interested and, what's more, it is very widely adopted by all Java projects I am aware of and perhaps even by a few non-Java projects. If there will ever be a migration to a new license like ASL 3 or a another change of the header policy, then RAT will likely play a very important part in the process. Even now, the RAT report is carefully studied as part of every release vote. (Funnily, RAT is very rarely used to inspect itself, because so far I didn't find a possibility to run a previous version of the RAT Maven plugin as part of a build. In fact, RAT is the only project I am aware of, which doesn't publish a RAT report. :-)
IMO, RAT could very well leave the incubator. It's 10 or so committers [1] are all part of an organization called ASF since years, so you might question the diversity, but I don't believe anyone will actually do that. ;-) The source code has been developed under ASL and by Apache committers right from the start, so licensing was never an issue. The question is: What's the target? RAT is way too small for an independent project. And I cannot imagine anybody of the current committers writing board reports. To me, a Rat TLP is no option. So we have the second possibility: Put it under the hat of another TLP. The only one that comes to my mind is the Apache Commons project. But Commons would be an excellent choice: Most, or even all of the RAT committers are Commons committers as well. Commons was one of the drivers for integration of RAT into every release build. I admit that I wouldn't like to change the package name or the Maven group ID again, but either Commons developers could accept that exception from the rule or I'd force myself to do the required changes. WDYT? Jochen [1] http://incubator.apache.org/rat/team-list.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
